[rant] i love this site, but....

Discussion in 'Off-Topic Discussions' started by gettingthere, May 27, 2010.

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  1. gettingthere

    gettingthere New Member

    i'm a long time forum lurker-on sites like this and others. i dont like posting, normally, but sometimes i'll get an account just to use the search function, or if it's required to view all threads.

    this is one of the first sites on the whole internet i've actually WANTED to be a part of. i found a subforum

    but i really don't think i will last long here. after 3 days , i STILL end up losing 3/4 of my posts. i get a message stating the post needs to be approved, but it never appears...i often have to post it 2-3-4 times over a couple of days for it to show up.

    i posted a HUGE database of degrees, something i thought would be very useful to the community, as a way of giving back. it took me bugging 2-3 moderators and posting it 4 times before it showed up, and now i can't even edit it from the messy results of too many copy & pastes!

    and i saw on one moderator's page that the mods decide after an undisclosed amt of posts that a user can post without that annoying message.....but if 3/4 of all the posts a new person attempts never gets sent, then it would take months to get approved!

    its so not worth typing long responses, or trying to take part in a discussion, or anything if the message won't go through.

    i am clearly not a spammer, and it shouldnt take more than a day of someone's messages to figure that out. i'm clearly not a machine...yet this site and its mods think i am. and they could care less that i want to contribute to the community. there are people who come on here, ask one question, and leave without even thanking the answerers. as soon as i posted my question, i paid it forward , trying to help as much as i could. you probably will never know that because most of my posts are in the mod abyss.



    and dont get me wrong--i like the institution of moderators. they make sure conversations dont get crazy. they ensure we arent' asked to buy viagra when we just want to talk degrees.....but this is excessive.

    and i've wasted enough time on a message that may never see the light of day.
     
  2. Kizmet

    Kizmet Moderator

    Don't fret getting, it'll all be ok.
     
  3. Chip

    Chip Administrator

    I think if you had a better understanding of the back end of things that nobody except the mods (and sometimes not even the mods) has to deal with, you might have a slightly different perspective.

    A couple of days ago, I went through and manually deleted three thousand bogus registrations that have been made over the past couple of months. Nearly all of those are made by Indian spammers. They make tons of them and let them sit and then spam with them a couple of months later.

    As the spamming has become overwhelming, I have instituted certain automated tools (we don't describe exactly which ones we use so as not to alert the spammers to our tactics) and, unfortunately, as the spammers become more devious, we have to institute more and more such tools.

    The particular tool that you are running into is an automated filter that looks for certain things and flags those posts for manual review. It only does so for a certain, limited number of posts, after which you won't run into the problem.

    The issue is that right now, the filter is set with sensitivity very high, because I made the decision that delaying posts for a little while was better than a board full of dozens of spam messages. But the latest filter settings are filtering more messages than they should be, and I'm working on solving that problem.

    I also just added another tool that is extremely powerful and, so far at least, is helping substantially in reducing spam. That may enable a reduction in sensitivity of the new-member filter without increasing the incidence of spam.

    Additionally, we will very soon be adding more moderators, which will also help messages get approved more quickly.

    Do keep in mind that everyone who moderates here does so on a volunteer basis, and everyone (including me) has other jobs, responsibilities, and life events to attend to.

    I do think that if you are a little bit patient, you'll see a pretty dramatic change. As always the mod team and the owners do appreciate all feedback and do take it into consideration in the decisions we make.

    Thanks
     

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