Hey, this is just Vive.
I got my old mod name reactivated today
I got rid of it beause I thought i was going to have a huge increase in demand of time at work, home, and school - but that hasn't happened yet, and won't for a few more months. So I can still hang around this site for the time being.
Anyway,
while I'm still here and if you need something modded just send something to this account or the vive la insurrection account.
of course, I'll now have to figure out what to do with two accounts. I don't have an anwser for that yet
welcome back, I guess? That was maybe a year ago you "left" and "vive" has been posting basically ever since...?
Oh wow, I had no idea that you two were the same person...
Yeah I kept waiting for my work load to pile up and to see when I could get accepted in a cetain school program, so I created the vive account to pass time. I can still spend time thinking about social science, which is good.
any advice or things that you think i needto be doing as a mod - or if you think I'm doing something wrong just post it here. I don't really plan on being too proactive with anything other than spambots.
On a sidenote, do you have any clue why this site gets so many spambots?
No clue,
If it wasn't always like this, it's probably just because there are less mods active than before. I really think the whole "new forum" thing shook this forum a bit too hard.
"As in a kaleidoscope, the constellation of forces operating in the system as a whole is ever changing." - Ludwig Lachmann
"When A Man Dies A World Goes Out of Existence" - GLS Shackle
Neodoxy:On a sidenote, do you have any clue why this site gets so many spambots?
Because it has no protection against bot account creation. The site gets picked up by a footprint so spammers know there is a forum at mises.org and bam, you're on a list somewhere. Then a trainable bot figures out how to create and verify an account, which is really easy when you don't modify the behavior of the template from the stock behavior. Even this doesn't help sometimes because if your site is valuable enough spammers create and maintain human-created login procedures to keep getting in (the good news is that the vast majority of forums aren't worth the effort).
IP blocks don't help, it's all done through proxies. Captcha may help, depending whose list you got on. Serious spammers tie their apps into DeatchByCaptcha which has real humans solving the captchas, but most spammers aren't serious. The best part is the more "clean" your site is the more valuable you are to the serious spammers that you really can't do anything about.
The best thing you can do is have a registration page with a random thing to do to verify that that the registrant is human. The randomness is the important part. One time it could be a math question, the next time it could be a "type the color shown", the third time it could be "type the full name of the institute", etc. If you do that, you're instantly unappealing to all spammers.
Crazy influx of spam.
If anything is bothering you about it either PM the William or Vive name - or just say something here.
Kill it before it multiplies
Were you referring to Vive, or the spam??
Vive,
I wish you luck with all the spam today. I think this is the most spam I've seen on the forums.
Best,
gotlucky
The November Farce Approacheth...
My god, it just keeps coming...
Yeah, it's bad. Anyway new things:
William account is no longer active
There is a chance I may delete new topics that show up during this by accident as they can get caught in crossfire. If that happens,let me know
As a mod, are you able to ban users or just delete threads and posts? Because I don't think this assault will end until those users are deleted.
Banning/deleting users won't "end the assault". If you notice, each spam account only gets off a post or two. On rare occasions one might go rapid fire and get off five new OPs...but these are all new accounts.
As cporter pointed just a few posts ago, the issue is basically the lack of tools in the forum structure. Account creation is free, and the only verification step is receiving an email.
There's really nothing that can be done to prevent it until we switch to another forum or new tools are added to this one. Or just disable new account creation entirely. But I doubt we want to do that.
One of these spammers actually had something like 30 posts. But you are right, the problem in general will not be solved until we go to another forum or switch software or something.
Um, why not captcha?
Also, why deactivate and then activate the William account?
Captcha is damn near useless at stopping spam. People will often see a reprieve in the short term if they make their way onto a captcha-free auto-approve list that circulates (those people aren't expecting captchas when they run their software, so they often don't check for it on a case by case basis). However, it's only a matter of time before you end up on another list of captchad-but-undefended sites.
If you want pre-built services, use an uncommon service like Ubokia or just have an image that includes some text and some quoted text and instructions for the user to input the quoted text to authenticate. Bonus points if it rotates off the Mises daily quote. =P
What you definitely never want to do is what everyone else is doing, because that's the next thing the Russians are writing software to bypass.
long story short:
I thought I was going to have a major schedual change in life sooner than later- so I ditched the account to help me not waste time on subjects that were peripheral / tertiary hobbies to my life. That didn't happen, and I got annoyed by the spam influx, so I asked if they wanted help.
Wheylous:Also, why deactivate and then activate the William account?
...and why deactivate it again and make the vive account a moderator? Why deactivate the William account in the first place? Why not just not log in if you don't have time to spend on the forum?
I don't know the answers to these questions either, Wheylous. But it would be a funny joke to say they keep me up at night.
As for the captcha, I have a feeling that would actually be more work than its worth with this platform (especially considering the apparent total disinterest in the community from the powers that be.)
Two accounts didn't make sense.
As for the rest, it was ust one of those little things to help promote good habits.
that's all I'm going to say on that. If you wantto get into personal stuff PM me
I fucking, hate captcha. Cant read damned thing 7/10 times. make it so u have to take a small survey before you sign up (the are you an austrian quiz, just shortened).
“Since people are concerned that ‘X’ will not be provided, ‘X’ will naturally be provided by those who are concerned by its absence.""The sweetest of minds can harbor the harshest of men.”
http://voluntaryistreader.wordpress.org
Brilliant sentence structure, Kelvin.
As to making better forums, as part of my LibertyHQ website I'm hoping to come up with a good solution to how to make good forums that have generally broad appeal. I'm thinking that some of the forum sections will be private and invite-only - as in you have to either have proven to be a productive user to be let on to the boards or you have to make a successful appeal to tptb of the forum.
@Wheylous: If you are web-programming inclined, I have $0.02 on the matter... as a long-time user of Internet forums (since, oh god, at least 1996), I offer them for your consideration.
1) Build on top of an existing platform that is widely-used and (hence) relatively bug-free. There are open-source forums out there that you can modify the source to suit your own needs but leave the bulk of it to those who have been doing this forever. THis is the #1 mistake of the mises.org forums. They tried to reinvent the wheel and we got Egyptian pyramid sleds instead.
2) Offer both threaded-view and linear-view. People have strong opinions about each.
3) Allow users to ignore specific users (posts from that user simply don't appear). Ignoring specific threads would also be a nice feature (certain topics that are perenially popular with certain groups are often completely uninteresting to others).
4) The one-stop-shop "Active Topics" and "My Discussions" views are the only good ideas on this forum S/W and could actually be profitably extended... you could create a system that actually calculates a "buoyancy" factor that is simply the post frequency taken over a suitable period (say, the last 24 hours) and let the number of Active Topics visible be configurable per user rather than having the same setting for everyone (5 visible until you click "Read More" at which you get dozens). You could even make the buoyancy period configurable if you maintain that information - most active by latest post (mises.org behavior), most active in the last hour, most active in 24 hours, most active in one week, etc. If I had these options, I would configure my profile so that "Active Topics" showed, say, the top-20 most active topics over the last 24 hours and "My Discussions" showed most active by latest post.
Of course, you should still keep the standard "topic-specific forum" view so that people can find particular posts.
*steps down off soap-box*
Clayton -
Oh yeah, I'm not planning to make my own software. I started a while back (5 years ago?), and I got almost nowhere.
Whatever RevolutionBox is running might be nice:
http://www.revolutionbox.org/