Posts filed under 'Techie Alerts'
December 4th, 2006
One bad thing about PHPBB, I’m discovering, is that it is very susceptible to spam. It seems like I prune about a dozen posts a day from the forum. Either they are blatantly so (links to viagra, PC software and Britany Spears nude), or they are honeypots for future spam (authentic posts scraped from other forums elsewhere on the web, hoping to be changed to blatant spam later). The RSS feed that shows the most recent changes on the front page has been a great help, as I can very easily check new posts for content before deleting the crap. I had to impose an inconvenient time limit on post frequency to discourage the massive submissions, and that has helped keep the problem from being worse.
There are two problems here. First, in a way the low use of this site by actual community members helps keep the deletions manageable. Frequent daily checking of the site coupled with infrequent contributions of value means I don’t have to go off the bookmarked home page to check for new stuff. If future changes pump up the site volume, the current method of spam patrol will get a little more inconvenient. Second, the site seems to be on some spammer list now as a free place to post crap. The variety and frequency has picked up, even if the effectiveness has not (the posts aren’t lasting long). Spammers automate and thus don’t worry much about checking for anything more than success of a post.
Among the to-do list items is a reworking of the submission process in PHPBB to give denials to more crap posts. The best solutions, though, would be a tool for PHPBB that works like Akismet does for WordPress blogs. That is, similar posts show up all over the web. Having all posts go through a central database check can flag them as spam if someone has encountered and rejected a post as spam previously, and then quarantine them. Collective action works miracles for the blog, but wikis and forums need the same kind of protection.
September 6th, 2006
I was surfing some political blogs and found this Canadian piece. While the context of the sentiment isn’t relevant, I noticed the embedded chat tool in the sidebar and wondered if it would be a good tool to incorporate here.
Gabbly is a chat service that allows you to chat around any webpage. The tool is supported by several browsers (Firefox 1.5, IE 6.0, Safari 2.0, Flock, with more on the way), and a link can be provided for a floating version of the chat. There is no filtering — other than using our domain name as the name of the chatroom — so all sorts of content may diminish the chat experience. However, each user has the ability to censor users on their own and thus manage his own sensibilities.
August 8th, 2006
I added a news feed that will allow us to bring in some published content elsewhere on the web as blog posts here. The first test was done last night with Politics1, the very cool campaign coverage site that has been running (more successfully) as long as we have. In addition to disseminating news on congressional elections (and other campaigns) throughout the States, Ron Gunzburger also sells — or at least sold — me some Jimmy Carter campaign buttons. It should be one of our goals to get listed on his site.
This new news feed will evolve over time to include other useful information from other sources. In the future, the posts will likely be better marked than they are now to indicate an external content source. (Just to clarify, Ron isn’t coming here and posting … although that is a privilege that can be opened up to interested 3rdparty members.)
Below is a list of political blogs Ron lists in his blogroll in the lower sidebar of his site. You might want to take a look at some of these and see if there are ones worth adding to our own feed.
POLITICAL BLOG ROLL:
July 19th, 2006
A new page showing recent edits to this site is available from the front page of the Third Party site. Hopefully, this will make it easier for members to see what activity is new to the site and provide easy clicks to navigate into the area to continue a discussion.
Let me know what you think …
July 12th, 2006
As we wait for the 3rdparty.org domain to fully arrive at our new location, some bugs have already been discovered and are being addressed.
- The forums were misordered from the import of UBB data on July 3. (corrected)
- There is an issue with the Quorum login with some usernames, so the chat area may produce some non-functionality or even PHP errors. (in the process of being corrected)
- The wiki pages are not showing up when clicking on links (corrected, once 3rdparty.org resolves correctly)
Please try to post comments here that identify new problems. We’ll try to address them as quickly as we can.
July 11th, 2006
Whew.
What began in 1998 as a couple of former high school pals typing into the Great Void has now gone through a second major growth spurt. For the past few weeks, this web site has been working through some technical issues in the background to publish a new upgrade for our Third Party community. We’re expecting some hiccups, of course, but are otherwise pleased to only be a week later than our intended symbolic re-launch date of July 4.
Please feel free to explore the new space and, of course, report any problems. Dive into the content. Research political questions. Make connections with others. Come to the online chats we will be scheduling. Make yourselves known.
A special thanks to those of you who have been hanging in there over the past several years. Jeff and I feel like a hurdle was cleared this past year, and we enthusiastically look forward to the continued evolution of this community.
