Bots

A bit exaggerated as a reaction, no? The mods probably aren't only yet, it'll get cleaned up then.

ninerbuff wrote: »

They're back again?

A.C.E. Certified Personal and Group Fitness Trainer
IDEA Fitness member
Kickboxing Certified Instructor
Been in fitness for 30 years and have studied kinesiology and nutrition

This morning--here in Europe--there were 2 pages full of ads for call girls in Dubai. I had never seen anything like it, and I've been here 10 yrs. I just reported them. It was too much to tag as Spam one by one. It's been resolved--that's the important thing.

Betty - a moderator - has already tagged the 'flag the spam' thread to say they have been booted.

are people still able to create an account and post on the forums without captcha and email / account validation? How about a delayed/moderator approved release of the first one to three posts on top of that if it is a new(ish) account without other activity yet? Hmmm....

AnnPT77 wrote: »

PAV8888 wrote: »

are people still able to create an account and post on the forums without captcha and email / account validation? How about a delayed/moderator approved release of the first one to three posts on top of that if it is a new(ish) account without other activity yet? Hmmm....

Looks like others' opinions vary, but I don't think this is a frequent enough or big enough problem to merit much investment beyond current state. I'd rather the devs worked on bug fixes or even features, but that may be a minority report. This is one of the more scam/spam free social environments I participate in, subjectively speaking. I'm maybe too tolerant of a small level of nonsense, though, dunno.

You're separating cause and effect. Or some such I am too tired to think on how that should be phrased!

We are operating in a "nice" world because of crowd-sourced effort and essentially unpaid volunteers plus the few paid people who do clean up.

A LOT of manual effort -- that could be spared by taking a few far from unique steps:

Captcha before posting is already implemented in private message sending on MFP. Based on other situations I am aware off the cost of grafting it on top of existing solutions is minimal. Hours not days. Why not implement it for the first few posts of a new account?

I would even take a bet that defaulting accounts to have no posting rights till their email address has been validated is probably an already available setup option for the forum software. Why are "we" allowing accounts to be created and have forum posting rights within minutes of account creation with no human intervention or rate limitting?

You've seen way more spam than i have as I've only occasionally hit the spam thread. But a LOT of the spam I've seen has been from newly minted accounts. They're easier to control than password theft, right?

I mean *I* was hit with a rate limiter while manually posting complete essays... I don't see why an hour old account can keep posting without triggering a hard stop before further approval?

PAV8888 wrote: »

AnnPT77 wrote: »

PAV8888 wrote: »

are people still able to create an account and post on the forums without captcha and email / account validation? How about a delayed/moderator approved release of the first one to three posts on top of that if it is a new(ish) account without other activity yet? Hmmm....

Looks like others' opinions vary, but I don't think this is a frequent enough or big enough problem to merit much investment beyond current state. I'd rather the devs worked on bug fixes or even features, but that may be a minority report. This is one of the more scam/spam free social environments I participate in, subjectively speaking. I'm maybe too tolerant of a small level of nonsense, though, dunno.

You're separating cause and effect. Or some such I am too tired to think on how that should be phrased!

No, I don't think so. I think you just care more about achieving that outcome than I do . . . which is fine, a perfectly valid view (of yours, probably OP's and others') which I respect. I don't see it as much of a problem, in general over time. Pure subjective opinion. That's despite contributing to the volunteer side of that.

Fixing all the little annoyances - as a generality - is a distraction from the bigger priorities, no matter how easy the little fixes, in a software-management environment. Where the tradeoff is is a subjective thing, a judgement call, always. While I come from a software management professional background when I say that as a generality, I'm not claiming any added special extra weight to my subjective opinion on how annoying or effortful the particular thing is because of that background.

If anything, I'm acutely aware that my total ignorance about MFP's technical architecture could lead me to make inaccurate assumptions about how hard or easy certain changes would be. (Given MFP's age and changes of management, "architecture" may be a generous term, and that's not a criticism of the company or the software, either. It's common for software to "just grow" in that way.)

Lots of things I don't personally have to do (or don't know exactly how to do) can seem like not very much work - I've learned from hard experience. I would think that things would be technically/logistically harder if they involve the intersection of the actual MFP app and the third-party Vanilla Forums software that supports the Community part of MFP - two separate companies, managements, staffs, priority schemes, cultures.

It's true that the volunteer effort piece of this scenario reduces incentive for a management structure to improve things using developer time. There is a some staff effort in herding the volunteers, as well as staff personally zapping stuff. I don't know the level of that effort.

What I think is a good software management strategy is to track all the little annoyances, and tweak at improving them when touching the affected code for "grander" reasons, sort of continuous preventive-maintenance hygiene alongside new development. IME, few companies have the discipline to do that. It's not super easy IMO, from an impact analysis standpoint among others.