MODERATOR CLEAN UP

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Re: MODERATOR CLEAN UP

Postby mark_man » Sun May 26, 2013 10:56 pm

http://www.canonical.org/~kragen/tao-of ... mming.html
Like you point out I cannot see any of the spam so was unaware of any of the problem you highlight .What I do notice are the 26 users on line and some of the names of them and from the name you can easy see they are spam bots .just do what you need to ,sounds like peter has helped ,so if he can he will continue to help?
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Re: MODERATOR CLEAN UP

Postby rob » Sun May 26, 2013 11:08 pm

I do hope you get the "power" to manage these problems, I would hate to see the game go down.
If things don't get better It might be a good idea to collect email adresses from all active players. It wouldn't be too hard to set up shop elsewhere if this forum ultimately fails.

Thanks for the time you invest in this!
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Re: MODERATOR CLEAN UP

Postby mark_man » Sun May 26, 2013 11:11 pm

Good idea rob and yes thank you bythelee for your help and efforts
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Re: MODERATOR CLEAN UP

Postby bythelee » Mon May 27, 2013 3:45 am

You're welcome guys.

I have the time, and feel it's worth trying to protect and preserve the wealth of challenges and solutions in all of the AR categories.
I have watched in amazement at some of the dark stuff from AR1, and the Masters competitions.

Also, Peter Stock's armadillorun.com is his own commercial website, totally separate from this forum (which is hosted as part of Peter Thoman's metaclassofnil.com website), so if this forum does go dark we should be able to restart something via armadillorun.com too.

My main fear is that I've felt the forum hasn't been that healthy the past few months, often timing out or failing to respond. The size it grew to over the first six years, has now expanded 10x in just the last year, and it's accelerating. But it won't be difficult to get it under control, so long as we get the admin help needed from the two Peters.

I'm waiting at least another week ('til June 3) before contacting Peter Thoman about site Admin (and fixing Mark All) so plenty of time for people to voice their ideas. I'd also like to hear back from Peter Stock about the user Prune before taking the admin plunge.

PS Yes, I'm sure Peter Stock will continue to help. But, he has said his time is limited, and he doesn't want to get involved in regular admin tasks. He also checks his email very infrequently, so we might be waiting for weeks between "helps".
That's why I'm hoping he'll let us take over by upping our powers.
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Re: MODERATOR CLEAN UP

Postby Andrew » Tue May 28, 2013 12:54 pm

If you don't have any luck sorting out the spam problem, there's an alternative solution. I have a virtual server that I run a couple of websites off... I could install a forum there. One that would actually be actively maintained!
I have a forum on another server, and that has no spam, and no spam problem. The solution is asking a question on signup that anyone who'd legitimately use the forum would know... Plus there are backups if they get past that (which does happen, but rarely).
Well, let me know how you get on with the problem...
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Re: MODERATOR CLEAN UP

Postby bythelee » Tue May 28, 2013 2:14 pm

Thanks Andrew.
I don't suppose you know of a way to "move" the existing forum over? We'd be starting from scratch, I suppose - not that there's a lot to the present AR2 A league. I'd just be sad to see all of the other stuff lost.
And, would it be a significant cost to you? I'm guessing we'd have to buy (rent) a domain name at the very least.

Would you prefer us to try contacting Peter Thoman to fix the present website, or just shift across?


I think Peter Thoman is actively maintaining his other xxx.metaclassofnil.com websites. He's certainly still around, posting stuff to blog.meta... just last week.
At worst he's forgotten he's hosting armadillo.meta.... at best he's just ignoring it and letting it roll along.

Peter Stock said that acquiring decent captcha checks would "cost". I'm less convinced by this now, because it looks like more recent versions of phpBB (which is free) have better checks built in. But again, we'd need Peter Thoman to help with any software upgrades.

I agree that a simple question might suffice, but apparently spam bots are getting cleverer at working out those "question" blocks, especially if it's something that a google search would quickly reveal. That you presently don't have a problem is a good sign though. And the active management is highly desirable! :D

(Incidentally, thePits is now on Page 3 for me, because of the 100+ new spam topics since the last post in the challenge!)
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Re: MODERATOR CLEAN UP

Postby rob » Tue May 28, 2013 10:40 pm

I think you should try to contact Peter Thoman. If he's okay with giving you the power to turn things around there's no need to move. If he wants to get rid of this website he might be willing to assist in transferring it all to another host.
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Re: MODERATOR CLEAN UP

Postby Andrew » Wed May 29, 2013 1:32 am

I'm happy to host it, that's no problem, however without the help of an admin you can't really move a forum over -- direct access to the database is required. Note I say you can't really because you could scrape all the data and put it on the new site... but it's far more complicated that way. I have a lot of experience with web scraping and could do achieve this but I wouldn't, unless it was very important for some reason.
Anyway, I don't imagine this would be necessary, I'm sure you can get hold of the admin somehow.
If I were to host, it'd be free, because it wouldn't cost me anything that I don't already spend. I don't imagine there's all that much traffic -- apart from the spambots! A proper domain would cost money but I could also set up a subdomain and that'd be free, albeit a random .co.nz domain.
Anyway, see if you can get hold of Peter and we'll go from there. It'd be far easier if you could just get full admin rights here wouldn't it?!
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Re: MODERATOR CLEAN UP

Postby bythelee » Wed May 29, 2013 12:41 pm

Yeah, getting admin powers would help immensely.

I'll wait a bit longer, hoping to hear back from Peter Stock about what he can do.

A new spammer from singapore has popped up overnight, he's added ten posts to this thread alone, and is outstripping everyone else put together for sheer volume of traffic.
So, spam has just doubled.......
I'm thinking banning powers will help, but once someone knows how easy it is to get access, they'll probably just make a new account and attack again, won't they?
(If they're clever enough to write a spambot, they'd be clever enough to log where they got in easily...)

Nice to hear about the "free" hosting. Traffic would be very low, if you can keep the spammers out.
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Re: MODERATOR CLEAN UP

Postby mark_man » Wed May 29, 2013 7:30 pm

not a lot of point in spamming if no one can see it lol
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Re: MODERATOR CLEAN UP

Postby bythelee » Thu May 30, 2013 3:22 am

mark_man wrote:not a lot of point in spamming if no one can see it lol


True, but the spammers don't know that, especially if they're bots. I'm wondering if they get paid "per post" so once in, they let rip.

Mostly it's for cheap handbags and knock off goods. Like, since when does a dillo need a handbag? :lol:
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Re: MODERATOR CLEAN UP

Postby bytheMod » Mon Jun 03, 2013 2:57 pm

Peter Stock checked in again: It looks like I now have the admin powers needed to start dealing with the spam really effectively.
DecMod is also now an active Moderator.

Mark All is still bust, but there are admin powers that allow handling by User, so some users (like one who has 23,000+ posts in the moderator queue) can be blown away with a single click. :D

The database is presently 4.3Gb in size. Pretty big for what amounts to a load of text, plus 63Mb worth of uploaded files.

The Admin Control Panel is a really scary place, though.
It looks very easy to break something, so I'm going to start small, and try to stick to just the spam cleanup. It's possible to change things like the PM Inbox, and number of attachments per message, both of which have caused me headaches in the past, so it's already tempting to use this power for personal gain..... :twisted:
I can even attempt to update the phpBB software the forum runs on. :shock:
But Peter also says it's possible to backup the forum, which I haven't found yet, so I'll be looking for that first.
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Re: MODERATOR CLEAN UP

Postby bytheMod » Mon Jun 03, 2013 3:14 pm

Just an update on the EndOfTheWorld Recovery Scenario:

I hope nothing bad is going to happen, but if the forum does have hiccups, please do keep trying to connect.

If I do break it, I'll contact Peter Thoman immediately about fixing it.
I'll also email Peter Stock to post something on the Armadillorun.com website
I will contact Andrew about his offer to host a new forum as a last resort, using the backup to get us started.

At least from here, there is a visible light at the end of the tunnel. :D
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Re: MODERATOR CLEAN UP

Postby mark_man » Sun Jun 23, 2013 11:06 pm

Any chance we could have a bigger inbox please
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Re: MODERATOR CLEAN UP

Postby bythelee » Mon Jun 24, 2013 12:07 am

Yessss, there is a way to increase it. But I left it where it was because Peter T chose it this way originally. Back in the heyday, lots of users with twice the inbox size would have meant a lot of extra data, so I can understand his choice, although it makes things tricky for challenge hosts.

My personal solution was to create an additional inbox, and set up a rule to send any overflow messages to that one instead. All doable through your profile / account settings.
But I struggled to cope with the Indiana results, even with the two lots of 15 messages, so I agree we could go a bit bigger.

How big an inbox did you think you would need? 20? 25? 30?
Given that we can create extra inboxes, there's not really any harm in having one big one.
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