There are a few levels of powers:
Admin is the highest, you can edit the website with that.
Then there are Global Moderators, who can moderate the whole forum at once.
Group Leaders can add users to their group and give those users whatever powers the group is allowed.
I got given Moderator powers in the moderator group, which means I can approve posts and threads, modify posts, delete them, etc.
But I can't ban users, and the "mark all" function not working means it proves impossibly arduous to clean all of the spam of the site, because I can only do it one by one, instead of 50 at a time.
Peter Stock got prompted by my email to
enquiries@armadillorun.com, about SketchyGalore. He is not an Administrator - if you check the "members" page you'll see he's in a group all of his own (Armadillo Run Developer) but I think he must have powers close to Administrator, if not admin itself, because it was he that boosted me to moderator.
From the samples of Peter Thoman's code visible on his website (he hosts the forum, and is the sole Admin), I wouldn't be surprised at anything.
Go to
http://metaclassofnil.com/ if you want to be REALLY scared. The google explainer under a google search says "When you have learned to snatch the error code from the trap frame, it will be time for you to leave." Which is a clue about what to do with what you see on that webpage, to get into the website - but I havn't the programming skills to work it out.
It turns out we had one active moderator, Ioncorpse, who approved Sketchy's posts which gives permission for further posts to not need approval. Now we've got me too, and decMod for a third when Peter Stock reads his emails again (don't hold your breath).
As for "not being a ghost site", Peter Thoman (the admin) has not logged in since 2009.
Peter Stock had not collected the two PMs I sent him in April
2012 until last week, when my email prompt brought him back to resolve Sketchy and bump me to moderator. So, actually, the site has been completely unattended for over a year, with the sole exception of Ioncorpse.
Ioncorpse told me (before I was a moderator) that only moderators get to see all of the unapproved posts and topics. And we can't turn it off, either.
Seeing all of it makes it pretty impossible to find anything, which is why I've been suggesting seperate moderator accounts for those wanting it.
Since 252 thePits started, we have had a further 250+ New Topics started. Which means, the 251 Results thread is now on page 6 for me. And those are just new Topics, and does not included the spam posts that are being made to existing valid topics. Anything unapproved does not show for normal users, so everyone else sees only the good stuff. We couldn't see Sketchy's posts until Ioncorpse had approved them, but they were sitting there waiting for approval even though we were blind to them.
The AR2 A league alone has about 28000 topics, instead of the 509 or so "valid" ones. That means there's almost 600 pages of topics, instead of the 5.1 pages of valid topics.
All of this spam has arrived over the past year, since mid-march 2012, about the time I joined, and Peter Stock changed the joining rules. Previously new users had to be approved before they could do anything. But Peter found it too tedious trying to filter the spam applications from the genuine ones (I got very lucky!). Now, new users get automatically registered upon activating their email, but can't post anything without moderator approval. So the moderators get flooded with the spam topic and post approval requests instead, and the website database balloons with the information it has to hold.
We're only one year into this "new routine" and I have no idea how long it can continue before it gets so big and so cluttered that it breaks the server.
Most posts are text, but are typically long (like this one). Yes, it isn't a lot of data, but it's the sheer volume of entries that makes the database big. It's a library with close to a million books, even if each book is only page long, and that takes a lot of filing, searching, and record keeping, which is what makes the database big.
This level of spam is occuring across the entire forum, in all of the categories. So, it has expanded tenfold in the past year, and is accelerating. My fear is that doing nothing will see it break under the flood (in a DDS type of problem) or the plug simply gets pulled when Peter Thoman sees the webspace and bandwidth being used by the armadillo part of metaclassofnil. He has other domains too, so metaclassofnil won't go, but the armadillo bit might.
If "mark all" was working, the moderators could clean all that crap in a few hours of work. That it isn't, means it will take me about 10 hours to clean just the AR2 A forum Topics, and at least the same again, for the spam posts within valid topics. Repeat that for every category on the website...... It simply isn't doable.
If you discovered that a neighbour was sucking ten times your average data from your wireless broadband connection, you'd probably do something about that, wouldn't you? Especially if you never used wireless connections. You'd possibly just turn off the wireless part - that's when the AR forum will just "go dark".
I'm hoping that if we approach Peter Thoman nicely, co-operatively, etc, offering to take care of it if he lets us have the tools for it, we can stem the tide and keep things happy with a little housekeeping. He's been sponsoring us without being involved for the past four years, so I hope we're not a big part of his empire, and he won't mind it continuing that way, if we take care of it.
That it's grow to be ten times the size in one year, after seven years of gentle use, means we probably will show up on his radar soon anyway.
If we do nothing, the site will eventually get slower and slower, as the server it is hosted on struggles to keep up with the ballooning database. And moderators don't currently have the working tools to fight it.
I've had a few instances where the site crawls to a halt, or fails to respond completely. Like the "site down" Mark_man experienced. I don't think the database is big enough yet to kill it, but it all depends on how much horsepower the server has. For such a lite forum, set up so many years ago, do not expect it to be much. EA failed to cope with the server loads when SimCity got launched recently - it's that sort of danger territory we may be approaching. But I can't tell how near or far we are to tipping over the edge.
It won't take much to get things healthy again, but we do need stronger powers to deal with things than what the moderators presently have.
PS
I emailed Peter Stock with the list of 13 users, and notes about "pruning" them. This removes their accounts, and deletes all of the topics and posts at once. It could cut the database in half for maybe ten minutes work, and kill maybe 50% of the presently incoming crap, so that seems like a bargain, and could win us a lot of time. If he has the admin power to do it, that is.....