Why is WP suddenly going to hell ?

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We get the occasional troll who posts in word salads. Not too often, though...and they're zapped pretty quickly.

If you want to delete your own post (when you accidentally double-post) it might take a long time, and sometimes it doesn't "take."

Once in a while, if you make a post, you are asked to sign in again. Then, you sign in, make a post, and are asked to sign in again. This doesn't happen too often.

Occasionally, one is "blocked" from WP--but this is happening less frequently.

Actually, they have been more frequently here than usual, and it's been very painstaking to remove them all, but I dunno how to stop them, if anyone knows how, feel free to share.

Toysoldier said there are only 2 moderators here!

Is that true?
I think the whole problem is right there!

I know I gave Toysoldier some lip, but maybe he or she is exactly the sort of caring, concerned and passionate aspy that should be recruited as moderators?

we tried recruiting more, but Alex chose only Kip - so now it's basically three of us (XFGeek, Kip, I) plus Who_Am_I.

Otherwise it's OK, but when we're spammed as we were lately, we could sure use any additional help.

so Toy soldier was right



I remember a time when there were so many moderators you couldn't sneeze with out being handed a tissue!

Hugs!
You are doing a Fantastic job!

Aw thanks, hugs to you as well!

The problem has never been with the mods. They have all been good eggs. There's an organizational issue and now also a spamming problem. Mods having to manually chase spam down one post at a time is horribly tedious and very likely unnecessary if the forum settings are fixed.

Part of that is the mods being able not only to ban by email, or domain, but there are even further methods such as server and computer. That's the part about giving mods full capability.

Thats' kind of been the whole point of this. 1) Does Alex recognize the spam problem? 2) Does Alex recognize that this sort of thing, and his lack of response/action is what led to the quitting of 3 long term mods? 3) Is he or his associates working on it? His only response was to 'report spam posts', so I haven't actually gotten the answer yet.

But based on past performance I don't expect to. It was worth stirring up some crap trying. Others have raised the issue too. Sometimes multiple complaints will go further then just one.

But no I would never be a mod here, for multiple reasons. But I am trying to be a mod helper not hurter. I do appreciate the effort and time they put into it. I can get overly worked up over something once in a while, but I am working on lengthening the time between wrecks.

thanks.

it's not all "one at a time" but it is a pain. i'm lucky when all of a spambot's leavings are threads in one forum, because them i can move a maximum of five or six at a time. or posts in one thread, because i can split them all off with one action. it's when they are spread all over the site, bumping old topics and whatnot that it strains me. Boo, XFG and i have completely different schedules and rarely are we working on one attack together.

i may be mistaken, but alex has access to a special tool that automatically eliminates all of a user's posts alongside with a ban. i've seen it used on a few spammers before and the posts counts were all reset to zero. i don't know if any of the regular moderators have had access to this before but then again, looking at all the racket this is causing, we haven't had a spam problem of this magnitude either.

the requirements for registration are pretty much a standard boilerplate for any online community (with an ASD twist of course), fill out personal info, username and then captcha. some spambots use optical character recognition tech that can bypass it, perhaps we should upgrade to harder ones that scramble the text more? that could work but then again we have users here with comorbid vision problems, etc which we don't want to turn off. i dont have the power but we could add something like a few random questions in registration area to prove human-ness? security questions?
there are also flood control methods such as asking for a confirmation when making multiple posts in a short interval (which spammers do) to prevent overwhelming the forum, which may reset after a set time. but i see users who do that here as well, i hope they'll understand. just my thoughts, anyone, feel free to add more.



yeah there's username, ip and email blacklisting. thing is, so many users don't display their emails. there's been quite a few spammers from the ukraine.
i whack usernames mostly, but it couldn't hurt to sift through those posts and get rid of any ip addresses shared by spammers.



well, we appreciate your feedback much. as long as you have good intent, no worries. thanks anyway.



yay hugs to all

Spambots aside, I find the new guise of WP much more user friendly, and am likely to be more often in attendance.

Nope, I don't have moderator powers.

I have been reporting a lot of it lately and it does seem to disappear under the name reported but new names are jumping onto the site as quickly as the old ones are banned

huh.

can you still access GM at least?

Hmm ... someone who can act quickly ... decisively ... with no concern for being unpopular ...

Do we know anyone like that?

Most of the good moderators left. We need them back.

What happened? Did you step down or did alex fire you?

Who Am I is quite busy with her career. I'm sure she wasn't "fired."