Hi. Can we do something about all the spam?

[peterw_diy]

@mstone 172685 wrote:

the trouble is that switching to anything else means losing all the history, all the links, etc., which are a valuable resource in themselves

FWIW I think vbulletin itself is just fine – it’s mainly the incredible volume of spam that’s making this place so much less pleasant than it should be.

[drevil]

Can a few people just volunteer to police and zap the spam when it comes in? I can be one of those people.

Whoever’s in charge, feel free to ping me…

Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk Pro

[jabberwocky]

I don’t think a change in forum software is necessary; vBulletin is actively updated and does have built in options (and plugins are available) for various anti-spam measures. We could probably use an update though. We are on 4.2.3; vBulletin 4 was originally released at the end of 2009 and the .2.3 update is from 2015. The latest stable version of 4 is 4.2.5 which was released this year, but there is a version 5 as well.

Really, it seems like we need a knowledgeable admin to put a little time in to get the software updated and look at what can be enabled on the backend to cut down on spam registrations. Deputizing a few junior mods to delete spam would be a helpful stopgap measure as well.

[Harry Meatmotor]

@drevil 172732 wrote:

Can a few people just volunteer to police and zap the spam when it comes in? I can be one of those people.

Whoever’s in charge, feel free to ping me…

Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk Pro

This is kinda what I was thinking too.

[hozn]

@peterw_diy 172726 wrote:

FWIW I think vbulletin itself is just fine – it’s mainly the incredible volume of spam that’s making this place so much less pleasant than it should be.

I guess.

I feel like it’s actually pretty horrible software, even besides the spam issues (which I realize can be counteracted within vbulletin):
– Quoting a post that has any HTML chars (e.g. “<" -- there - try to quote this now! either results in 503 error or the post being cut off.
– The “what’s new” stream doesn’t support any filtering. E.g. poor people that don’t care about freezing saddles.
– Finding anything is a mess. Better now that it uses Google for the search, but weirdly disjointed.
– Image uploads are terrible. Best option is Tapatalk, as using the web software embeds only a tiny image in the document.
– No integrated system for mentions.
– PM/DM interface is god awful. No good notification system for private messages.

If we’re going for “forum software that feels just like it did 20 years ago”, then this does fit the bill. But this could really be a whole lot better.

[jabberwocky]

@hozn 172767 wrote:

If we’re going for “forum software that feels just like it did 20 years ago”, then this does fit the bill. But this could really be a whole lot better.

To be honest, thats the main reason I like it. Its basic but simple and easy to use. I agree some of your points would be nice to address (I’d love to filter out everything that has anything to do with freezing saddles, for example), but having used other pieces of forum software I’m not sure that more modern ones are any better. They just trade one set of annoyances for another.

Facebook is a much more modern system that could certainly be argued as a descendant of old school forum software, but I could write a muuuuuuch longer list of things that piss me off about Facebook than I could about vBulletin.

[n18]

If there is such a thing as light moderators or minions who only have permissions to delete new users in the last 4 days or so, or users who have less than 10 to 30 posts or so, then that would be ideal. These minions shouldn’t have permissions to see members profiles and email addresses and the like, because they don’t matter.

So what’s it going to be? DrEvil or Minions?

[mstone]

@drevil 172732 wrote:

Can a few people just volunteer to police and zap the spam when it comes in? I can be one of those people.

Whoever’s in charge, feel free to ping me…

They already talked about it, at least some people replied, they haven’t (AFAIK) actually implemented it.

[Author]

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