Posted by sleepy - Wednesday 14 March 2012 - 20:19:26 -
Everyone has been putting up with the ridiculous amount of spam on the site for far too long now, so I've taken some pretty serious steps toward dealing with that problem. First of all, I've gone through and banned several hundred spammers as well as deleting several thousand of their spam posts. Even with help from an automated tool to do this, my wrist is sore from the clicking.
I've also instituted a "new user" time period. When you sign up for a new account you will not be able to post links of any kind right away and the number of posts you can make will be limited. Even after you get past this new user phase you will only be able to post a maximum of 2 links per message. Period. Most of the real forum traffic here doesn't need links so this shouldn't pose a problem for anyone.
Additionally, I've added a new security plugin that scans for known bots, detects hacking attempts, and checks every site access against a list of "evil" IP addresses that are known for distributing spam and/or malware. This should effectively make the server a little more responsive since bandwidth won't be wasted on the hackers and spammers.
Hopefully none of these changes will affect your user experience in any way... but if you see anything strange happening, please let me know. On the good side of things, since this is a "real" solution (unlike my previous workaround of just disabling the comments system), so everything should be seamless and back to normal. The comments system has been re-enabled and all of that should be working well.
Anyway, I think that covers it. Hope everyone enjoys the new and improved rdocs!
Posted by sleepy - Thursday 03 November 2011 - 22:21:14 -
I received a generous offer from pelleas (who is well-qualified for the task) to join the editorial staff and assist with getting more docs posted for public consumption. A big "thank you" and "welcome aboard" goes out to pelleas!
Posted by sleepy - Friday 30 September 2011 - 18:05:58 -
Well, comment spam was starting to take over the site. Thanks Alastair for letting me know what was going on.
So, I just finished banning dozens of spamming users and I also deleted about 7000 (yes seven thousand) spam comments. I'm sure I missed some but things should look MUCH cleaner now.
Also, since new spam comments were outnumbering new legitimate comments by about 1000-to-1 I'm disabling comments completely for now. This should upset all the spammers and they will all hopefully go away. I will re-enable comments in the future once I feel confident that most of the spammers have left or I have had a chance to spam-proof the comment system.
Posted by sleepy - Friday 10 June 2011 - 17:49:08 -
Wow, those hackers have been busy these past few weeks. I kept removing the malware and they kept putting it back because I didn't have the time to really fix the vulnerability that allowed them to put the malware on the site in the first place.
So, I just had to sit down and really take the time to fix it right. It took most of the day, but it's done. And I'm pretty sure that will mark the end of the hacking and malware.
I gave everything a good once over to make sure the key features are still operational, but as always, if you notice anything weird, let me know. Thanks!
Posted by sleepy - Thursday 05 May 2011 - 13:06:11 -
For years now, I have often been a bottleneck to getting docs out to the public download area. The editors have always been a great help in quality assurance, but the process to actually move docs from pending uploads to the public downloads area has always been a painful (and dangerous) one that I only felt comfortable doing myself.
That time is now past. I just completed some tools that will let the editors go completely from initial upload to public download with no intervention by me necessary at all. Once they get used to the new system I'm sure we will see a great influx of new docs. We should also see a distinct lack of "Now we have to wait on Sleepy" forum posts.
So, if you see something that you want in the pending list, let your editors know. But still try to be nice please! The fact that they now have the power to give you what you want doesn't give you the right to demand it. Remember we are all volunteers here.
Posted by sleepy - Saturday 26 February 2011 - 09:55:09 -
replacementdocs would like to extend a hearty welcome to Jamos who is our latest addition to the editorial staff here. He will be joining SimonU in plowing through our mountain of submissions.
News::Rumors of the death of rdocs have been greatly exaggerated
Posted by sleepy - Tuesday 22 February 2011 - 08:29:28 -
As is prone to happen every time life gets busy for our all-volunteer staff here, people declare the site is dead. That is not the case (I just posted about 40 new docs). Is it not being updated as quickly or as often as you would like? Probably. But even figuring out the best way to fix those problems takes time.
The response from the call for editors last year was pretty minimal unfortunately. And of those that did respond, most either very rarely visit the site and/or have never submitted anything. So I have difficulty believing they would actually help much with the workload of going through our backlog. There's maybe one exception who I will be contacting shortly.
I've also been considering setting up some kind of "Assistant Editor" system. This would be for people who don't have the software to create or edit PDFs, but could still be helpful to the editorial staff by fixing naming/categorization issues and flagging uploads as "Duplicate", "Corrupted File", "Banned Doc", "3rd Party Doc", "Bad Page Size", "Provisional Quality", "No Problems Found", etc. when they look through the pending uploads.
I think that having a system like this in place would be a great help to the editors and myself, but it would also require some significant programming effort on my part to set up... so I'd want to know that people would be willing to participate first before I waste my time. Comment here if you're interested.
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