Our poor TRS Forum!!

[bubba-mudd]

WTF is up with all the spam on the forum! Cranky Old Mod where are you!?!

[tokenuser]

Originally Posted by bubba-mudd

WTF is up with all the spam on the forum! Cranky Old Mod where are you!?!

Crank Old Mod has been on strike since thanksgiving.
In the super secret moderators forum I announced that with the demise of TRS it was time for me to go.

And not a peep was heard from the Rev3 staff.

The forums have been neglected, and what was once the cornerstone of the Rev3 community was abandoned.

I spent so much time deleting spam manually, that no one ever considered upgrading security or software, or blocking the ip address of known spammers.

So I gave up. It pisses me off to see the forums go this way, but the lone piece of spam deleted by a rev3 admin since I stopped was a nice effort - but the ignored the other 55 identical pieces of spam the same person had posted in other areas, and didn't bother to ban the account.

Moderators are volunteers - but someone of staff needs to take some responsibility. Just a little maintenance. An occasional patch. A security update. Block an ip range. Something.

Until they show they care, I'm afraid I don't

[bubba-mudd]

Originally Posted by tokenuser

Crank Old Mod has been on strike since thanksgiving.
In the super secret moderators forum I announced that with the demise of TRS it was time for me to go.

And not a peep was heard from the Rev3 staff.

The forums have been neglected, and what was once the cornerstone of the Rev3 community was abandoned.

I spent so much time deleting spam manually, that no one ever considered upgrading security or software, or blocking the ip address of known spammers.

So I gave up. It pisses me off to see the forums go this way, but the lone piece of spam deleted by a rev3 admin since I stopped was a nice effort - but the ignored the other 55 identical pieces of spam the same person had posted in other areas, and didn't bother to ban the account.

Moderators are volunteers - but someone of staff needs to take some responsibility. Just a little maintenance. An occasional patch. A security update. Block an ip range. Something.

Until they show they care, I'm afraid I don't

Ah. Man. It really is over, huh? Thanks for your hardwork. I guess it's time to turn out the lights. This sucks.

Oh well. Have a great New Year!

[tokenuser]

Originally Posted by bubba-mudd

Ah. Man. It really is over, huh? Thanks for your hardwork. I guess it's time to turn out the lights. This sucks.

Oh well. Have a great New Year!

I don't want to give up, and if someone at Rev3 showed they cared - even a little - I'd clean up the spam and keep going.

But this is their business, and building communities should be part of the business model. That means more than having a Disqus widget attached to the episode postings on the main page (IMHO that was the beginning of the end for community involvement - it fractured the community instead of driving traffic to the forums where people engaged each other).

2013 is just around the corner (or just started depending on your locale).
Its going to be a big year.

I can't wait to see what personal projects the TRS guys have in store. I suspect they will be back in some form - maybe not on Rev3, but while TRS might be gone, Team Awesome is still there ready to regroup.

[axtimus_prime]

That is unfortunate. Thank you for volunteering.

[damnedeyez]

Originally Posted by tokenuser

So I gave up. It pisses me off to see the forums go this way, but the lone piece of spam deleted by a rev3 admin since I stopped was a nice effort - but the ignored the other 55 identical pieces of spam the same person had posted in other areas, and didn't bother to ban the account.

I reported one in the TRS forum...which makes me wonder if that's the only reason that got addressed.

I can't say I blame you...they don't seem to care about the community anymore.

[satori]

Thanks Tokenuser, for your hard work... I'm sure you felt the burn during the Geekdrome days, but I get why you'd ignore this stuff now. All the best whatever forum you land in.

[darth-ed]

I've reported a fair number of spam posting, but there was just too many this week to report! I reported a couple. Maybe I'll report some more and see what happens.

I'm willing to give the Rev3 staff the benefit of the doubt. A lot of this recent spam was posted during the holidays, and I bet a lot of the Rev3 people are on vacation. However, if they really are unwilling to upgrade the security of the forum software, that's deeply concerning.

[tokenuser]

I just cleared out the TRS spam.

14 pages @ 25 threads/page.

But in terms of forums upgrades - the Rev3 forums are based on vBulletin vBulletin 3.6.10.

vBulletin is currently shipping v5.

To put that in perspective, vBulletin 3.6.10 was release back in 2008.

Stopping forum spam - at least checking against a blacklist of known addresses before allowing posting is easy. This is one solution - http://www.vbulletin.org/forum/showthread.php?t=176481

Its a forum, its not rocket science.

[damnedeyez]

Originally Posted by tokenuser

I just cleared out the TRS spam.

14 pages @ 25 threads/page.

I was just about to say it was gone...thanks a ton. We appreciate you, even if Rev3's abandoned us all.