It's got the last comment I tried to enter, but the post comment button won't work. It's probably because I'm posting from my phone... I'll have to try from a computer some time...
If you have something like firebug installed, you can see if it's sending anything off to the server and what the server responds with, that might provide some insight.
There was a request on the now playing thread for ability to delete our own posts. I am moving that conversation here.
Here's the story. After some minimal digging on forums and going back and forth with my fake account I still cannot figure out a way to enable delete for members only on their own posts.
So here are the choices as I see them right at this moment, unless Eythian or someone can bring more computer-fu to bear:
1. More people get to be Admins (the folk who post here a lot). That enables deleting pretty much anything, including other users' activity and threads and even accounts. It still means only some people get to delete, probably those who post here a lot. It means if you are one of those people you can delete all kinds of things, on purpose or incautiously, though some basic attentiveness should avoid most accidents (it does take three clicks to delete a post).
2. We enable deleting of posts for all Members. That would scratch an itch evidenced by all the Oops posts over the years and today's request. The snag: it seems that if I turn that on, you can delete ANY post, whether or not you posted it. Serious question: which is worse, not being able to delete your own posts or the likelihood that sooner or later someone else clicks in the wrong place thinking they are deleting their own lapse and deletes your post, maybe one that took a while for you to construct. (Remember that a Member is just any site user who has confirmed an email address, including our recent spammer). Would this make us angrier with each other?
3. We leave the delete toggle off (I have turned it back off for now) and stick with Oops posts as the delete method.
4. Eythian or some other admin does something smarter than I could come up with.
( @eythian et al, in Roles and Permissions in the Dashboard when editing the Member role there is a toggle for "Actvity - Delete" which looks as if it should do what I want but appears to do nothing, or I have not been able to figure out what it does. It does not seem to enable deletion of posts, I've been testing with a fake Member account. Or is there some other restriction on new Members that I am hitting? Then there is the other delete toggle lower down under Default and that enables deletion of everyone's posts, not just one's own.)
I'm fine with just continuing to do oops posts, really! I just thought maybe with all the changes that maybe that was an option now too. No biggie though. Option 1 and 2 scare me; I'm mostly on my phone, so I'm almost guaranteed to screw things up if I'm an admin. And there's no way I want everybody to be able to delete. We've been lucky to not really have any fights here, but I don't like the idea of filtering people out because we think they might run around deleting things...
Yes, I tend to agree with amc2. I've got no problems with regular users having access to that facility, but I really would not want it for everyone (ie anyone) to do, as it could lead to all kind of issues with spammers.
Is it possible to put something on the sign-up to stop automatic spammers - you copy the number/letter combination? I hate doing them, but they must have some effect
We already had that - a Captcha thing where you had to copy a word. Three have got past it in a week. And one of them verified their email address and moved from Noob to Member.
I have changed the registration process to needing approval. I'll try to keep a close eye on it. That's not foolproof either? How do we know if someone is a spammer when they apply? At least I guess it means someone will know a new person just joined and can keep an eye on them.
Ugh, make that four, I just banned another one. That's three today.
I have turned on moderated posting for Noobs. I also just declined two applicants after searching for their posted email addresses on Google and finding both had spamming activity at lots of other sites, so the approval step does do something useful.
I presume it is because of this transition to Vanilla that we suddenly have floods of spammers? Has that made us somehow more visible or more vulnerable?
We have had 38 new members in the last 24 hours, all spammers as far as I can tell. Was someone doing this much housekeeping on the old board?
I have registration set so new members have to be approved. Six of the new applicants have appeared in the applicants queue and I have researched them at stopforumspam.com and declined them. The others have gone straight to Noob. Why? Is someone else among the admins approving them? Eythian, any ideas? I am wondering if it might be that they only come up for approval as members after they have verified their email.
I also have moderation turned on for Noob comments, but as soon as they confirm an email address (and based on what I am seeing at stopforumspam.com many do use stable email addresses for this purpose) Noob status ends, though like I said I think that is when they come up for approval, so I think the dam is holding. Deleting a lot of comments in the moderation panel.
I presume it is because of this transition to Vanilla that we suddenly have floods of spammers? Has that made us somehow more visible or more vulnerable?
I speculate that the old software was so out of date that the automated bot scripts didn't know how to interact with it any more.
Why? Is someone else among the admins approving them? Eythian, any ideas? I am wondering if it might be that they only come up for approval as members after they have verified their email
I'm not very sure of the process, my only guess is that someone approving them is required for getting to 'noob', they should be in 'applicant' prior to that.
It seems that whomever hosted emusers before may have either been smaller or less inclined to promote itself
The hoster hasn't changed just that it was running Really Old Vanilla and now is running current vanilla.
but I'd certainly have no qualms about going back to the earlier board
That's not a possible option. The version it was running was old, unsupported, and unsafe.
When I get a bit of free time in the next few days I'm going to add a few anti-spam plugins, hopefully that'll help.
I work 2nd shift & when I get home at 1am, I watch my Tivo'd Wheel of Fortune first thing because my life is all that exciting & it reminds me of my deep love for my parents & inlaws.
I'll check for spammers during Wheel commercial breaks.
A piece of bad design in Vanilla, IMHO: When folk sign up and become Noobs, in the user list I can see their user name, email, and IP address. That's useful if I am going to be able to check that people are really spammers before consigning them back to the pit from which they crawled. Some spammers use a constant email address and keep changing IP, some vice versa, so sometimes it is only one otr the other that shows up in spammer lists.
But when people become applicants that information is not provided, only their email. That is not helpful - in many cases emails look like spammers, but not always, some of them have coherent email addresses. And the people in the list of applicants do not appear in the user list, so there is no way of cross-checking.
We have roughly equal numbers of people becoming noobs and applicants.
ETA, I experimented with a fake account, and it is working like this:
When you register you become a Noob and get listed in the user list.
When you confirm your email you get removed from the user list and put in the applicants queue, where the admin is no lo longer able to see most of the information about you to evaluate you!!!!
However: Tip for other admins: when folk fill out the registration form they have to enter a sentence saying why they want to join. This only appears to the admin when they confirm email and get put in the applicants queue. It appears under their name. The spambots all enter:
"{I want to {see new threads|follow the discussion|be part here|see new additions|access all parts|contibute|say something|reply to a thread|reply to a user|message a user|contact a user|read everything}."
So I think any applicant that has that as their registration text can be deleted. And if we ant to save more work and don't mind the user list growing apace, we could wait until the Noobs confirm and get put in the applicant queue to delete them. How long is a reasonable period before deleting a Noob who never posts or confirms their email address?
I'm assuming the spammers don't really read any of the threads and its all bot-driven. Why not put something in the "A Beginners Guide to Emusers" thread that says if you'd like to join to include some certain phrase or word in the email request as part the "sentence saying why they want to join". ... like maybe ending the sentence with "#EmuserSpamBot" or "#The19thDot?"
Any requests that are submitted that are missing that word/phrase can be denied/rejected.
I saw there were 14 new applicants this morning, right before I was leaving to get my car fixed. Didn't have time to write up a post and ask about them. They all had coherent-looking emails, so as far as I could tell, they should be approved.
There's another one, just now....with that same registration text. I'll delete it.
I think that it's currently set up so that people require moderation until they become full members.
However, my busy weekend is over, my parents have left my house and are continuing their drive through the north of the country, so today or tomorrow I should be able to get some real preventative measures in place.
I thought most of us here were just a dwindling bunch of tired old rebels and dissidents from emusic with the occasional straggler who was late getting the memo about getting more misery than joy for your music dollars at the other place.
Are there really that many applicants who constructively contribute to the conversation (irony noted concerning my perceived participation). With the possible exception of the buzz caused by the recent Vanilla upgrade, I haven't seen an awful lot of new participants or threads over the past year or so.
Shouldn't most of the applicants be considered spammers or am I missing the new revolution that is taking place right in front of my eyes?
Comments
Craig
I have registration set so new members have to be approved. Six of the new applicants have appeared in the applicants queue and I have researched them at stopforumspam.com and declined them. The others have gone straight to Noob. Why? Is someone else among the admins approving them? Eythian, any ideas? I am wondering if it might be that they only come up for approval as members after they have verified their email.
I also have moderation turned on for Noob comments, but as soon as they confirm an email address (and based on what I am seeing at stopforumspam.com many do use stable email addresses for this purpose) Noob status ends, though like I said I think that is when they come up for approval, so I think the dam is holding. Deleting a lot of comments in the moderation panel.
have floods of spammers? Has that made us somehow more visible or more
vulnerable?
Why? Is someone else among the admins approving them? Eythian, any ideas? I am wondering if it might be that they only come up for approval as members after they have verified their email
I'm not very sure of the process, my only guess is that someone approving them is required for getting to 'noob', they should be in 'applicant' prior to that.
It seems that
whomever hosted emusers before may have
either been smaller or less inclined to promote
itself
The hoster hasn't changed
but I'd certainly have
no qualms about going back to the earlier board
That's not a possible option. The version it was running was old, unsupported, and unsafe.
When I get a bit of free time in the next few days I'm going to add a few anti-spam plugins, hopefully that'll help.
I can help!
I work 2nd shift & when I get home at 1am, I watch my Tivo'd Wheel of Fortune first thing because my life is all that exciting & it reminds me of my deep love for my parents & inlaws.
I'll check for spammers during Wheel commercial breaks.
Any requests that are submitted that are missing that word/phrase can be denied/rejected.
^ that sounds like a good idea, kargatron
I saw there were 14 new applicants this morning, right before I was leaving to get my car fixed. Didn't have time to write up a post and ask about them. They all had coherent-looking emails, so as far as I could tell, they should be approved.
There's another one, just now....with that same registration text. I'll delete it.
However, my busy weekend is over, my parents have left my house and are continuing their drive through the north of the country, so today or tomorrow I should be able to get some real preventative measures in place.
I thought most of us here were just a dwindling bunch of tired old rebels and dissidents from emusic with the occasional straggler who was late getting the memo about getting more misery than joy for your music dollars at the other place.
Are there really that many applicants who constructively contribute to the conversation (irony noted concerning my perceived participation). With the possible exception of the buzz caused by the recent Vanilla upgrade, I haven't seen an awful lot of new participants or threads over the past year or so.
Shouldn't most of the applicants be considered spammers or am I missing the new revolution that is taking place right in front of my eyes?
Craig