About the spam trols
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I've slowly been exploring Discourse as an option to migrate to: http://www.discourse.org/
Twitter, among others, uses it for their developer community: https://twittercommunity.com/
Someone has written a migration tool for SMF 2 (that still needs to be looked at and tested): https://meta.discourse.org/t/importer-for-simple-machines-2-forums/17656
Sam and Jeff come from StackExchange where they had a lot of experience with dealing with spam and have some interesting solutions: https://meta.discourse.org/t/what-about-the-spam-problem/2724/6
Also, it isn't PHP, is mobile friendly, etc.
There is no time frame on the potential migration, but Discourse has a pretty hefty lead at this point.
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My vote is stay SMF. (that is if I have one… ;D )
Ive been on many different forums and seems to me the spammers have ways into any of them. They seem to propagate to the forums with the most traffic and hover there.
Staying vigilant about deleting their posts and accounts quickly seems paramount to making them feel unwelcome.
Seems like those most successful at halting them at the gate have an approval process that takes lots of time.
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My vote is stay SMF. (that is if I have one… ;D )
Everyone's opinion is welcome. Whether or not they hold any weight is at our discretion. ;D We definitely put heavy weight towards the majority opinions of community members in manners such as these.
My vote, at this instant at least, is to stay with SMF as well. Maybe there's a compelling reason to move to a new platform at some point, but I don't see one right now. I'm not opposed to change if there is a better option at some point.
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Good luck killing all the spam.
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if it's too much work to deal with spam, then esf should ask for / appoint some more mods , to help deal with the spamming.
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Just to be clear, this is something I have mostly been doing on my free time out of personal interest in methods of community organizing. I only replied because the subject came up in this thread. SMF has and continues to do a great job for us and looks healthy: https://github.com/SimpleMachines/SMF2.1/graphs/contributors
To me forum software has basically been different flavors of the same lollipop until more recently where some interesting solutions to organizing online communities and their generated discussions have been tried and tested.
In terms of spam, I view putting creative locks on the front door and assigning certain people the privilege of hitting anything with a bat that looks like spam that comes though as a little old school (but still necessary mind you). When possible I prefer to arm everyone (well this analogy escalated quickly) and leave bouncers as a last resort.
Spam also wasn't the only "problem" I was trying to see has been solved more elegantly elsewhere. Other features of note:
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just-in-time loading so you don't have to slog through pages if you forget what page a post was on
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one level threaded comments (on the fence, but seems to prove useful in a Q&A support scenario): http://blog.codinghorror.com/discussions-flat-or-threaded/
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live preview of reply text, with out having to leave the context of the thread.
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comprehensive API
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community moderation (i.e. arming everyone)
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so much more: http://www.discourse.org/about/
If this ever gets to a point where I have tested it and feel comfortable with a migration, there would be plenty of community input pre and post migration as before: https://forum.pfsense.org/index.php/topic,65565.0.html, but for now it is merely one idea of many.
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I think there should be a quiz before you can post. It would be beneficial to stop both spam and the same questions over and over again. Example:
To allow pfSense traffic from LAN hosts to the Internet, any necessary firewall rules must be placed on which interface?
- WAN
- LAN
- Both WAN and LAN
- No firewall rules are necessary.
See Also: https://doc.pfsense.org/index.php/Firewall_Rule_Troubleshooting#Interface_Selection
Maybe a couple of those at random…
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I think there should be a quiz before you can post. It would be beneficial to stop both spam and the same questions over and over again. Example:
To allow pfSense traffic from LAN hosts to the Internet, any necessary firewall rules must be placed on which interface?
- WAN
- LAN
- Both WAN and LAN
- No firewall rules are necessary.
See Also: https://doc.pfsense.org/index.php/Firewall_Rule_Troubleshooting#Interface_Selection
Maybe a couple of those at random…
Oooh, I like that a lot. 2 birds, 1 stone. :)
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The actual level of spam doesn't seem like a big problem currently. IMHO.
Steve
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Me too - I haven't noticed much spam. Seems under control…
On a seperate note, please click the links below for great savings (-:
www.buymyjunk-itssuperawesome.com
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Seems legit….. :P
Steve
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Me too - I haven't noticed much spam. Seems under control…
On a seperate note, please click the links below for great savings (-:
www.buymyjunk-itssuperawesome.com
I know you have a lot of (maybe not super-awesome) junk. So disappointed that the URL does not resolve :(
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I'm actually penniless and junk-less. I was hacked and had my identity stolen once… After a short time, they returned it. Thats how bad it is.
But yes - I don't think spam is such a problem now. I think seeking perfection is a fools errand. For great expense you could perhaps do a little better but its not worth it.
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I think seeking perfection is a fools errand.
I know at least 3 people (2 on this forum and 1 in my personal life), 1 company and 1 country who'd disagree with you ;D
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Its like an arms race. You can't win. Its best to not compete but rather to seek a happy medium.
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@Mr.:
I think seeking perfection is a fools errand.
I know at least 3 people (2 on this forum and 1 in my personal life), 1 company and 1 country who'd disagree with you ;D
Fool reporting for duty ;D
Didn't see anything about discourse before. Thanks for pointing that out. Seems like a pretty good option. The mobile (phones/tablets) focus is important IMHO, since there might be a lot of people that are reading up on the forums on phones/tablets when they mess something up and they are trying to fix it. Having an easier read would be helpful.
My vote is for whatever lets us edit old posts :P
Any chance of herding the offending IPs using a blocklist?
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Its like an arms race. You can't win.
;D
We economists have graphs and difficult formulas on both, as well as huge databases with empirical data. Our preliminary hypothesis is that he who aims at the top might actually get there, while he who aims at the bottom most certainly gets there :P
( ;D )
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OK - So what exactly (not generally) will fix the spam once and for all? Since you have the data…
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OK - So what exactly (not generally) will fix the spam once and for all? Since you have the data…
That is the exact same question a spammer would ask… just sayin.
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Well - Sort of. I just think that if someone is proposing to leave the current system there should be a better system to move on to. Thats all. And if you are a proponent of dumping the old system, you should have a new system in mind. So, by this point I'd expect to see a list of better solutions.
