im cleaning up a little at the moment

[ian 32]

just incase any one gets schocked.

Im just doing a little TLC work for the forum. Getting rid of the spam treads and grouping together some information.

if you cant find your favourite tread, try the search button on the top right of each page or just ask me for help.

Ian

[Daid 298]

My own subsection! Whoho! Victory ;-)

[ian 32]

Daid for all the work you are doing for the ultimaker community, its the least we could give you.

Ian

[ian 32]

i probably havent put every single tread in the right section, but if some one spots a blunder, please let me know.

atleast... yippeee there is a little organisation to the forum now and as I listen to members, I will be tweaking the site to make it the best centre for ultimaker users.

Ian

[ian 32]

hi guys.

i try and go through every thing new each day and wipe out the spammers and keep the forum clean but if you guys spot any thing, please send me a short PM.

that would be a lot of help.

Thanks and best wishes.

Ian

[ian 32]

zapped 4 more bad boy spammers tonight.

Ian

[ian 32]

zapped another nasty spammer today...

if any of you guys see spammers in action, please shoot me a quick PM just with their user name please.

Thanks.

Ian

[ian 32]

jesus im away for about 3 days and the whole forum is rotten with spam bot adversts in every corner.

the guys that have control of the ftp of this site, should look into improving anti spam measures.

I like cleaning, but prevention is the mest method ?

Ian

[fluxline 0]

Any chance that you will put in place a better new user authentication mech soon? This is getting far worse and difficult to look through active posts, and you're correct ... cleaning is not the answer. Either that, or add a few more mods to keep up. I think if it continues much longer, you're going to start losing people back to google.

[IRobertI 480]

Yes something really needs to be done as it seems things are escalating. I've looked around a bit and it seems that enabling the "Q&A" plugin under "Spambot Countermeasures" is very effective in stopping bot registrations. So that would be my first step.

And if you need extra manpower with the cleanup I'd be happy to help.

[codemaven 0]

We are drowning in spam... make it stop... Pleeease make it stop!

[fuchs 0]

The forum is now basically unreadable, as nearly every groups is spammed and shown as "new content".

I flagged around 10 submissions as spam, but there were at least 10 more left, so i stopped flagging (and reading).

Something needs to be done ASAP!

[futurejames 0]

I noticed they've gotten more brazen too, occasionally you see them replying to a thread. It makes conversations more difficult to follow.

[IRobertI 480]

I sent a PM to the community manager last night but he still hasn't read it... They really don't seem to care about this forum at all, if they did it wouldn't have gotten to this point. I mean they hired a community manager and he has posted two times during the last month. I don't expect daily posts but at the very least he should be monitoring the forum and seeing threads like these and act upon it.

[joergen 1]

I agree, the new user hurdle needs to be set higher, and the spam needs to be stopped at the beginning.

[alaris2 1]

that's because the majority of the interesting technical discussion is still happening on the google forum

(which is also prone to spam).

this forum has been forgotten, despite being the official one, on account of most of the posts either being spam or people complaining that this that or the other doesn't work.

can we have more emphasis on technical discussion please? (maybe Ian can think of a way to arrange the categories to make this so?) more about making UM the better and best, making new parts, trying new materials.

great post from Bernhard Kubicek on the google forum about an UM in brass. can i see anything like that on here? no ;(

[joergen 1]

I agree, and seeing 64 spams ths morning means that forum management isn't working. Ian and UM, please save the forum

[IRobertI 480]

Alright, that's a full work day (more or less) and my PM hasn't even been read yet nor has any of the spam been dealt with. Personally if I was the owner I'd be pretty upset about the state of the official forum but hey, that's just me.

[joergen 1]

What we are seeing is a good SEO attempt, to feed fake content that looks right to google, and ultimately pushing a site like selling sports jerseys up on the first page. That aspect is already pretty bad, and at first i thought the owner hired one of those shitty SEO companies who unleashed russian or chinese drones. But looking up the site selling the jerseys, it turns put that even that is a scam and fraud, making this campaign even worse than i thought.

Which means that ian, or whoever is admin right now (i hope somebody is), needs to delete all those suspicious users, crank up te new user registration hurdle, and then delete all the crap posts.

I would assume that if we dont hear anything in the next 24-48h, that ian is either busy with other things, or has given up, and somebody should tell the UM headquarters that the forum isnt working right now, and that some work needs to be done.

[jenschr 6]

It's a classic problem when using PHPBB. It's so widely used that hackers easily can automate attacks once there is a glitch.

However - there's tons of ways to solve this:

- Keep the script (fanatically) updated at all times. Hackers react within hours.

- Implement a way to instantly "spam and ban" messages by any trusted user (that has 50+ good posts maybe?)

- Remove all the 10 (!) mentions of PHPBB in the HTML source (this is basically the same as announcing that you're hackable)

- Change the default script locations for login and register

There's heaps more, but that should be a good working list to start with

[ian 32]

good morning.

to be honest guys im a normal user that spents 40 minutes of his work day, deleting spams and spammer accounts.

I have done this nearlly every day for weeks now. And have done it without one euro and simply for the love of ultimaker.

Now mister Alexander, made it very clear, that the man is not willing to discuss the improvements needed to make this forum great, because !! and im quoting now.... he cannot work after working hours because he does not get paid for it !!

god you have to love the inspiration and determination in that sentence.....

on the other side, i cannt chat on skype during my working hours because my boss will simpyly ... fire me... :-(

maybe if i paid mister alexander money... ? he would talk to me on skpye..... ?

ontop of that pile of horse..... apples.

the man told me, that the ultimaker team also has problems with me ???

weird because i have basically no contact with any one else in the ultimaker team.....

strange man.....

but he seems to be the king of the kingdom, knowing all and doing all..

so my motivation to actually do any thing here is at the moment, at a all time low..... :-(

jesus i hope this new guy is never a motivations coach.... where is my gun..... BANG !!!!

Ian

[ian 32]

i dont know why im doing this.

im cleaning up this mess one more time today.... :-(

its not good helping a very ungreatful person like mister alexander.... :-(

iv also changed the counter spam bot measures and see if that helps.

............................... :-(

[joergen 1]

Ian,

thank you so much for the summary of the things that are going wrong at the moment, and I personally find the situation you were maneuvered into, quite unacceptable. Volunteering should not be slavery, but rather a well appreciated contribution to the community.

Alexander Baloche is therefore the official admin of the forum?

[ian 32]

thanks !!

yeah mister alexander is the boss and the man that actually gets paid to do all this crappp.

but hay ?? maybe mister alexander has decided, ignore this forum completly, piss me off big time and watch the whole thing.... burnnnn...

then every thing falls back into google groups and maybe thats what mister big... wants ???

thats what happens when a paper pusher gets a job in a creative company..

burocratic.... BS !!!!!

and the normal people get screwed !

Ian :-(

[floush 0]

Something needs to be done and that consists in my eyes of three major changes:

a) Moving to a more capable and future-proof forum backend: IP.board -->

http://www.invisionpower.com/apps/board/

b) Discuss in a small team how the categories should look like and reorganize them.

c) Appointing at least three capable moderators (additionally to Ian).

Regarding a)... I'm a big fan of the openpilot flight controller project. And I've never ever seen a better forum software than what they're using. It might be commercial, but totally worth every penny you put in. They way you're able to quote, write PMs, give awards to users, having a proper smartphone app, no spam, etc. is just killer.

Check out their forums for reference (currently featuring this crazy orange Halloween theme):

http://forum.openpilot.org/