im cleaning up a little at the moment

[SandervG 1,521]

Hi Ian and all other users,

I am kind of shocked reading all this and i it comes to me as quite a surprise!

As technical support member i am also supposed to check the forum every now and then but last week (maybe 2)

i have been very busy both in my personal live (moving) and at the head quarters.

So my apologize if there hasn't been anyone around to assist or talk to.

Unfortunately, today i am out of the office but tomorrow i will see if i can find out what exactly is going on because

all the things that are being said doesn't seem right.

I don't know exactly what happened but i am sure Alexander didn't mean it in a bad way.

I hope Ian can find your motivation to keep up your good work. And for starters, i don't have any problems with you

[fuchs 0]

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?

Judging from Erik de Bruins Master Thesis, he understands very well what motivates people to participate in volunteer work and OpenSource/OpenHardware projects - and so I can only conclude, that at least he doesn't atm know about what happens here (Spam and Work-wise).

So - IMHO - this situation needs to be escalated to a higher tier at Ultimaker. The current situation is bad for the Forum-Admins, the Forum-Users and the whole Ultimaker Idea.

As the situation also has a personal touch to it already, it would be best to have this escalation done via PM / EMail or even phone / skype / IM - and done it ASAP, as for sure the google ranking of this site will quickly diminish when it is flagged as Spam-Source. (In turn damaging the whole ultimaker.com site)

[ian 32]

its not a personnel problem...

ITS A FORUM PROBLEM !!!

[fuchs 0]

Please calm down and maybe close this thread, taking the needed coordination and clean-up and other measures to PM / EMail.

Thank you!

[ian 32]

im as calm as a cucumber ! :-)

but i really love this printer and the team ! and thats why i do so much work in the background to keep this forum clean.

im going to do what all irish do..... im going for a GUINNESS........

bye..... :lol: :lol: :lol:

[fluxline 0]

I am extremely frustrated/angered by the way this has been taken out of context. But unlike some i will contact the person directly. The idea that personal grudge should be discussed on a public forum is not how someone should deal with a personal problem.

This is supposed to be a community, one it seems you are responsible for maintaining with the partial help of volunteers that give their time on an availability basis. Open source/hardware has a habit of discussing things publicly, get used to it. That community has struggled off and on with technical problems that are solvable, and are now causing the community to move to other places. Mr Baloche, if you are responsible for these forums, IMHO a) it is astounding that the above quote is your first post, and b) you are failing in at least one of your responsibilities, I hope your other areas are not dealing with product but are limited to counting beans.

[ian 32]

read what other users wroth here.

people were asking every day.. why is this forum being ignored and left to ruin...

i wanted to see how bad you would let the forum get before jumping in and helping.

it didnt happen and today after reading more treads, that people were unhappy.. i told them what was happening.

open source.

open community.

volunteer helpers...

and you want every thing discussed secretly in the background ?

be a real team player ! pick up a cup of hot chocolate, relax on your sofa and talk to the irish man on skype !

you cant get a simpler easier solution !!!

Lots of hugs !

Ian

ps. dont delete this tread !

as a community that supports and makes ultimaker a feasable company, every one has the rights to read this !

other wise, its just another white wash and corporate try at... look kids... the world is perfect

[joergen 2]

i expected that if Ian feels founded or unfounded that he has a problem concerning my handling of things he can tell it to me straight up,but to do it publicly and without clear reason......i really don't agree with that and complete defeats the spirit of open communication that i belief is necessary to move Ultimaker forward in the open source community.

Ian simply stated what he thinks is going wrong when I explicitly asked him.

Since the forum is your responsibility, and you are on UM payroll (Ian is not), you carry the responsibility for the forum, which was left in shambles recently. How you manage your working hours, is up to you and your boss. We as the UM community just care about the community and results, and this is the very first time I am hearing the words "sorry, I don't get paid overtime" in this context. Every member in this community, 99% completely unpaid, will go over sticks&stones to help improving the community, no matter what time, and not like the DMV, which drops the pen at 5pm.

[IRobertI 520]

It's kind of funny how the core issue with this whole thread is the one thing that isn't even mentioned. There's talk of open source, unpaid overtime (this part just blew my mind considering how much unpaid work a lot of people are doing for UM...) and alleged misuse of administrative powers all of which has nothing to do with the core issue. The issue of this thread is simply - spam. Solutions for which have been suggested by myself and others, simple solutions. There are plenty of phpBB forums running free of spam so obviously it's an issue that can be solved without any new budgets having to be involved.

As for the other issues, well, they are separate issues and should be treated as such.

BTW, the "UltimakerAdmin" account that Alexander has posted under before (and the one I sent the PM to as I wasn't even aware of this other account since it has never been used) should probably just be deleted or better yet, actually monitored.

[joergen 2]

It's kind of funny how the core issue with this whole thread is the one thing that isn't even mentioned. There's talk of open source, unpaid overtime (this part just blew my mind considering how much unpaid work a lot of people are doing for UM...) and alleged misuse of administrative powers all of which has nothing to do with the core issue. The issue of this thread is simply - spam. Solutions for which have been suggested by myself and others, simple solutions. There are plenty of phpBB forums running free of spam so obviously it's an issue that can be solved without any new budgets having to be involved.

my words...

and now the next wave of spam is rolling in, since the floodgates are still wide open.

[fuchs 0]

If needed, shut down new user registration and redirect people for a few days (or what ever time it takes) to a "register via EMail" or disallow posting from newly registered users.

You are _in this moment_ damaging your brand and your reputation by letting spambots run wild - google will detect it, pagerank and trust will suffer and the users of the forum will be p*ssed off - new users will see a forum full of spam.

So you must act now, at least to a degree to stabilize the situation. This is a (small) crisis and measures need to be taken.

Trust me, I'm a pro :-)

[joergen 2]

Erik,

it is great to see that the problem is being dealt with... I would also suggest to have a captcha for each forum post at the moment, unless a user has already xx posts

[Daid 306]

I've just seen some now spam enter the forum...

FYI, I check the forum quite a lot, I saw about 10-20 spam posts a day. Ian did a damn good job of cleaning those up. But in the last few days it seems the floodgates opened.

Note, I run a phpbb board, it has seen a total of 5 spam registers in a year. Not because I handle spam that well, I just changed a few things in the account creation, but bots get around that. It's because Ultimaker is a high value pagerank target. The other forum is unlisted by google.

[blecheimer 9]

OK, there is new spam everywhere.

Dear admin,

is it really that difficult to shut down the automatic user registration and to switch to "validation by email"?

I am running a not-so-small PHPBB as well and from my experience I can tell you that changing the registration is verrry easy and for the moment highly effective. This will give you time to secure your PHPBB and clean-up your user-list.

BTW:

You cannot keep spamers outside with Captcha, because some of these spamers are real persons, not bots. I guess they are paid to spam.

[alaris2 1]

paid to spam?

I'm in the wrong job... I actually have to work to earn a living :(

[joergen 2]

I don't know what is wrong with a new user email verification process... the spammers make an obvious fake account every day now, and they are so easy to spot, but still left unchecked to freely spam the forum with 50+ messages.

[floush 0]

Absolutely, manual mail registration would do the job for now. Everything else doesn't seem good enough.

For the future we need a very capable guy who tweaks the phpbb stuff or we need to a better forum software. Please chime in if any of you guys got experiences with IP.board as well. For anybody who used it, it's obviously the very best you can get.

There's of course a converter which moves over all the old content (except the spam of course) to the new forum:

http://community.invisionpower.com/file ... onverters/

It would be the ultimate solution for Ultimaking. There's a even a feature to offer users the possibility to run a small blog within the forum to document their printing adventures (

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

).

Depending on the administrative effort UM wants to put in there's a $175 self-host version or nice plans depending on active users, if you want to leave the admin work to devs of the software.

DISCLAIMER: I DO NOT HAVE ANY AFFILIATIONS WITH THESE GUYS. I'm just convinced that it's the right way to move on for UM, based on the superb job it's doing for the OpenPilot.org community. It's even thinkable that we could close down the mailing list when on this software, because the "push notification" settings, subscription and PM possibilities are so much better than anything in phpbb.

@Erik, Alexander, Ian, Daid (& anybody else interested in this matter ): PLEASE check it out and think about it.

[fuchs 0]

I completely second that!

Btw it seems that the Spam-problem is well known for this forum http://forum.ultimaker.com/viewtopic.php?f=27&t=286 and it's an ongoing situation since nearly a year now.

:?

I find it a bit ... strange ... that the forum claims to be "The official Forum, don't use Google" and in the same turn, is being unable to keep it going. That's not how it works at all. :roll:

[IRobertI 520]

Wake up to 120+ updated threads, 99% of it spam. Lock down registration now and get this sorted!

[fluxline 0]

Fiddling while Rome burns

[ian 32]

weekend and jesus christ, the spammers are back in business.

:-(

[ian 32]

ok monday morniing and fresh spammers all registered activated and ready to go.

if im not given rights to go into the ftp back end of the forum and try and introduce some extra spam counter measures to give us a chance, then can some one please please please atleast install the update, where i can ban a IP address and also delete the user at the same time.

I am once again using my first 40 minutes this morning to clean up..

lets see how many days this will keep going until i i just loose interest again in cleaning this crap....

Ian

[IRobertI 520]

I've only seen 2-3 spammers since the big cleanup and those were accounts that were registered much earlier. I guess you're being too fast so I can't see them in time

[ian 32]

I've only seen 2-3 spammers since the big cleanup and those were accounts that were registered much earlier. I guess you're being too fast so I can't see them in time

yup !

i drink a coffee and when my girlfriend is gone... i sit down and kill spammers here as hobby ;-)

Ian

[ian 32]

this is f.......king crazy !!!

good morning forum :oops: :oops: :oops: