Web Forums

[Paul Johnson]

On Sat, Feb 23, 2008 at 10:12 AM, FatButtLarry
<[email protected]> wrote:

Seriously... phpBB is pretty exploited. Easiest way to keep the spammers off is to change some of the defaults, such as .php extensions, rename posting.php, or anthing a bot would be hard-programmed with.

I thought the easiest way was to use a mailing list and drop such
broken, useless and easily exploited front-ends, such as web
forums...it's not like most mailing list hosting software doesn't come
with a decent archive feature. And if they're too dumb to use email,
what hope do they have of being able to constructively discuss wine?

--
Paul Johnson
[email protected]

[Dan Kegel]

On Thu, Feb 28, 2008 at 8:09 AM, Paul Johnson <[email protected]> wrote:

And if they're too dumb to use email,
what hope do they have of being able to constructively discuss wine?

Being a curmudgeon, that's my own instinctive response.
But it's possible there's a generation gap at work
here, and people under 21 or so just don't use email
in general. There certainly has been a flood of newbies
posting since we hooked up the forum.
We can probably reduce the number of clueless posts
a bit by writing an FAQ tailored to forum users,
and posting it as a sticky post in the forum,
right where those folks expect it.
- Dan

[Renaud (Ron) OLGIATI]

On Thursday 28 February 2008, my mailbox was graced by a missive
from "Paul Johnson" <[email protected]> who wrote:

That being said, if you can't handle List-ID filtering by this point
in time, what possible hope do you have of 1) contributing
constructively, or 2) getting wine to work at all?

Once again, some of us want / use the [Wine] in the subject for other purposes
than filtering.

So, unless there is a good reason to remove it (other than annoying those
listers who do use it for filtering) could we please keep it ?

Cheers,

Ron.
--
It is not too late to turn back
from the Gates of Hell. Use Linux.

-- http://www.olgiati-in-paraguay.org --

[jnewman]

I am leaving the [Wine] prefix on the subject line. No more discussion is needed.

[DARKGuy .]

You rock. I have enough with my normal emails to also having to spend time
figuring out if an emails comes from WINE or not.

On another note, stop whining about the noobs you all. They aren't gonna
dissapear, just make a FAQ, some good help & rules threads, get some
hard-working moderators and install some captcha + question in the
registration form and you're done. Something that has always worked is "What
is two plus three minus four?" or something similar... not even Rapidshare
has been able to stop bots from downloading files from it with its
ever-changing captcha image, or simple phpbb confirmation captcha images.

Just my two cents :p, and YAY for the forum, it was about time (and it looks
great too).

On Thu, Feb 28, 2008 at 5:42 PM, jnewman <[email protected]> wrote:

I am leaving the [Wine] prefix on the subject line. No more discussion is
needed.

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[FatButtLarry]

Asking people with phpBB experience, the main things you need are:

1. captcha or similar for account registrations
2. moderate all registrations that make it past that
3. mods who like phpBB forums and catch and block as needed the people
who make it past that.

Some moderation on the gateway to the list would be useful as well.

I use Akismet on my WordPress blog and it's fantastic. There's a phpBB port:

http://www.eadz.co.nz/blog/article/phpbb-akismet.html

- though I know that a lot of wine-users posts get caught by my
various spam filters (presumably because there's so much spam for
warez copies of Windows programs), so I'd review and train it
carefully.

Various other ideas:

http://forums.digitalpoint.com/showthread.php?t=57141
http://boonedocks.net/mike/archives/49- ... -Spam.html
http://boonedocks.net/mike/categories/9-PHPBB
http://www.phpbb.com/community/viewtopic.php?t=427852

(I am not volunteering as a mod myself!)


- d.

Might be worthy of a topic-split, and sorry to respond so late, but captcha is garbage IMHO. It filters out people who have a hard time seeing and frustrates 10x the amount of people that it actually filters. And its not like computerized text recognition is a thing of the future.

What I've been impressed with is settable questions that make you prove you are human, like "what is this a picture of?" and show a wine bottle. Or make people solve a word puzzle. Heck, it might make registering for accounts fun instead of a PITA. Unfortunately, the world enjoys scrambling letters into unreadable checkered psychedelic images.



-Tres

[Paul Johnson]

On Thu, Feb 28, 2008 at 8:30 AM, Dan Kegel <[email protected]> wrote:

On Thu, Feb 28, 2008 at 8:09 AM, Paul Johnson <[email protected]> wrote:

And if they're too dumb to use email,
what hope do they have of being able to constructively discuss wine?

Being a curmudgeon, that's my own instinctive response.
But it's possible there's a generation gap at work
here, and people under 21 or so just don't use email
in general.

That's their loss. If they can't be bothered to use the proper
established channels, we shouldn't bother to change the channel to
cater to them.

There certainly has been a flood of newbies
posting since we hooked up the forum.

That's our loss. The quality of the threads has also gone down. Not
to mention the spam flood, plus that one moron who insists on
responding to every spam to tell everyone it's spam. Way to go,
there, too: A lot of us wouldn't have ever seen the spam if he hadn't
replied to it...

We can probably reduce the number of clueless posts
a bit by writing an FAQ tailored to forum users,

But being forum users, they won't read it anyway. Forum users come
with the attitude of "I'm not paying for help, but YOU FUCKING OWE ME,
DAMMIT!! I'm not going to provide any useful information about what's
wrong, you get to give me a magic fix! And it has to happen RIGHT
NOW!!111!! Do we really need them?

--
Paul Johnson
[email protected]

[Paul Johnson]

Only true assholes or the illiterate top post. Everyone else writes
in conversational order.
http://learn.to/quote

On Thu, Feb 28, 2008 at 2:08 PM, DARKGuy . <[email protected]> wrote:

You rock. I have enough with my normal emails to also having to spend time
figuring out if an emails comes from WINE or not.

Like it's that hard to set up a filter to tag/throw it in a folder.

On another note, stop whining about the noobs you all. They aren't gonna
dissapear, just make a FAQ, some good help & rules threads, get some
hard-working moderators and install some captcha + question in the
registration form and you're done.

In another words, remove the forum and go back to what we had before.
Subscribing to the list has proven to be an effective captcha, as well
as an idiot filter. "You must be at least this smart to use the
internet."

--
Paul Johnson
[email protected]

[burkey]

I like you Paul. It is so true of what I see on forums everywhere, 90:10
S:N ratio

I do however find Forums can be useful as a repository, especially when I am
at someone elses computer or do not feel like searching my own email.



On Fri, Feb 29, 2008 at 2:23 PM, Paul Johnson <[email protected]> wrote:

On Thu, Feb 28, 2008 at 8:30 AM, Dan Kegel <[email protected]> wrote:

On Thu, Feb 28, 2008 at 8:09 AM, Paul Johnson <[email protected]> wrote:

And if they're too dumb to use email,
what hope do they have of being able to constructively discuss wine?

Being a curmudgeon, that's my own instinctive response.
But it's possible there's a generation gap at work
here, and people under 21 or so just don't use email
in general.

That's their loss. If they can't be bothered to use the proper
established channels, we shouldn't bother to change the channel to
cater to them.

There certainly has been a flood of newbies
posting since we hooked up the forum.

That's our loss. The quality of the threads has also gone down. Not
to mention the spam flood, plus that one moron who insists on
responding to every spam to tell everyone it's spam. Way to go,
there, too: A lot of us wouldn't have ever seen the spam if he hadn't
replied to it...

We can probably reduce the number of clueless posts
a bit by writing an FAQ tailored to forum users,

But being forum users, they won't read it anyway. Forum users come
with the attitude of "I'm not paying for help, but YOU FUCKING OWE ME,
DAMMIT!! I'm not going to provide any useful information about what's
wrong, you get to give me a magic fix! And it has to happen RIGHT
NOW!!111!! Do we really need them?

--
Paul Johnson
[email protected]

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[burkey]

On Fri, Feb 29, 2008 at 2:26 PM, Paul Johnson <[email protected]> wrote:

Only true assholes or the illiterate top post. Everyone else writes
in conversational order.
http://learn.to/quote

On Thu, Feb 28, 2008 at 2:08 PM, DARKGuy . <[email protected]>
wrote:

You rock. I have enough with my normal emails to also having to spend

time

figuring out if an emails comes from WINE or not.

Like it's that hard to set up a filter to tag/throw it in a folder.

On another note, stop whining about the noobs you all. They aren't

gonna

dissapear, just make a FAQ, some good help & rules threads, get some
hard-working moderators and install some captcha + question in the
registration form and you're done.

In another words, remove the forum and go back to what we had before.
Subscribing to the list has proven to be an effective captcha, as well
as an idiot filter. "You must be at least this smart to use the
internet."

--
Paul Johnson
[email protected]

And I just top posted too.. grr, see what happens when I am talking to
someone when I reply.
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[FatButtLarry]

On Thu, Feb 28, 2008 at 10:23 PM, Paul Johnson <[email protected]> wrote:

On Thu, Feb 28, 2008 at 8:30 AM, Dan Kegel <[email protected]> wrote:

On Thu, Feb 28, 2008 at 8:09 AM, Paul Johnson <[email protected]> wrote:

And if they're too dumb to use email,
what hope do they have of being able to constructively discuss wine?

Being a curmudgeon, that's my own instinctive response.
But it's possible there's a generation gap at work
here, and people under 21 or so just don't use email
in general.

That's their loss. If they can't be bothered to use the proper
established channels, we shouldn't bother to change the channel to
cater to them.

There certainly has been a flood of newbies
posting since we hooked up the forum.

That's our loss. The quality of the threads has also gone down. Not
to mention the spam flood, plus that one moron who insists on
responding to every spam to tell everyone it's spam. Way to go,
there, too: A lot of us wouldn't have ever seen the spam if he hadn't
replied to it...

We can probably reduce the number of clueless posts
a bit by writing an FAQ tailored to forum users,

But being forum users, they won't read it anyway. Forum users come
with the attitude of "I'm not paying for help, but YOU FUCKING OWE ME,
DAMMIT!! I'm not going to provide any useful information about what's
wrong, you get to give me a magic fix! And it has to happen RIGHT
NOW!!111!! Do we really need them?



--
Paul Johnson
[email protected]

The forums auto top post, so you'll see more and more of that.

Is there a gmail setting that fixes this? I've kicked into text-only
and I'll do more to support the responses, but correct me if I'm
wrong, but I didn't receive a mailing-list-how-to upon signing up.

I think it's a bit selfish to call all forum users idiots. Last time
I checked, Google searches forums, not emails, and forums are much
easier to read.

If you keep slandering people willing to help and discriminate against
communication methods you'll just be left with your definition of
"non-idiots" and no idea of what real users are experiencing.

If the sudden spike in interest in Linux, Wine, and free software is
bothering you develop behind closed doors and no one will bother you.

All this venting can really kill the excitement behind such an awesome project.

-Tres






--
- [email protected]

[DARKGuy .]

Nosense.

I'm on the gameprogrammer list and there's a crazy chinese/japanese/whatever
guy with unicode chars on his name asking really offtopic questions such as
"how can I edit a video and remove the subtitles and edit it ofr my game
trailer????? could sombdy please give me a link to dl program??", or "hey I
need to get on a computer and I dont know the pass can somebody help me 2
get in without knowing the administrators password??"...

Seriously, go search for him in the list's archive. It isn't any fun, but
he's smart enough to use a mailing list .

As I said, you can't get rid of them unless you get GOOD moderators and a
nice registration filter (as FatBullLarry suggets).

The forum was a big improvement IMO, it was about time a forum was created
(sp?). People just need to get used to the gateway. Besides, only people who
know what a BBS was or are more suited to the old way of doing things prefer
mailing lists, while the... um, say, "new generation" prefers forums.
They're easier to handle and search in IMHO. Posting to a mailing list
through your email client has no comparison, but trying to search for
something in a list's archive is a hell compared to a simple click to the
Search button, put your text, choose your options, voilá.

Ah, A. Tres Finocchiaro answered. You couldn't have said it better .
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[Paul Johnson]

On Thu, Feb 28, 2008 at 7:34 PM, Daniel Burke <[email protected]> wrote:

I like you Paul. It is so true of what I see on forums everywhere, 90:10
S:N ratio

That being said, if we must have a forum, we should make it a
fundraiser. Email access, free. Forum access, >$1/mesg to post.

I do however find Forums can be useful as a repository, especially when I am
at someone elses computer or do not feel like searching my own email.

That's true, but like I said above, email archives serve the same
purpose a little more effectively, if only because forums fail so
horribly at message presentation and threads (before we even get down
to the content) as to make them unusable for the task. To date, the
only exceptions to this have been Slashcode (likely due to a more
usenet-reader approach from the start, and the karma/scorefiltering
systems generally forcing the finer posts to the surface and the
stereotypical forum posts generally sinking into oblivion) and
Livejournal (though not as much as Slashcode, thanks to a complete
lack of karma and scorefiltering).

At least most mailing list software supports mhonarc or some other
widely used, threaded mailing list archiver...

--
Paul Johnson
[email protected]

[Paul Johnson]

On Thu, Feb 28, 2008 at 8:15 PM, James McKenzie
<[email protected]> wrote:

Paul Johnson wrote:

Only true assholes or the illiterate top post. Everyone else writes
in conversational order.

You must not work in industry then. It is EXPECTED your reply will be
on top, ready for the boss to read. Bottom post, or even worse,
intersperse, and you might get to visit the boss, with all of your
possessions. Remember, not everyone is familiar with nor cares about
RFC 1855. All they want is an answer, now if you please.

Actually, I do, and I have said as much to supervisors before and kept
my job. You can get away with it if you actually know what you're
doing. I don't know what parallel universe you're living in, but it
must suck to work with people who can't deal with basic English
skills.

No, keep the forum. Just remove the link between the forum and the
mailing list. See which gets the most traffic and eliminate the other.
Bet the mailing list looses. Mailing lists are so last century for
technical support issues. Now, development and announcements are the
place for mailing lists. Or better yet, IRC for support.

You contradict yourself there. If mailing lists are so last century,
how isn't IRC? Seems like Jabber MUC has long obsoleted (5+ years
now) IRC by your own measure of obsolescence.

--
Paul Johnson
[email protected]

[Alan McKinnon]

On Friday 29 February 2008, Paul Johnson wrote:

You contradict yourself there.  If mailing lists are so last century,
how isn't IRC?  Seems like Jabber MUC has long obsoleted (5+ years
now) IRC by your own measure of obsolescence.

This shit is exactly the kind of shit I want to avoid and filter out of
my inbox.

Exactly how is this related to Wine anyway?

You two - knock this off please. You might think your conversation is
very entertaining between yourselves, but I doubt everyone else wants
to see it too.

Get this conversation off-list and onto IRC/IM/whatever. Please.

--
Alan McKinnon
alan dot mckinnon at gmail dot com

[Paul Johnson]

On Sat, Mar 1, 2008 at 7:03 PM, James McKenzie
<[email protected]> wrote:

Suck? I would not go so far. These people are called BOSSES and they
can may or break you. If you don't follow their rules, you might just
as well start a new job search. And good luck if the new place calls
your old boss.

Nice thing about Oregon is that former employers are legally
prohibited from saying anything bad about current or former employees.
Employers that do end up losing huge sums of money to former
employees taking them to court over it. They can choose to say
something nice, or nothing at all. In practice, most companies here
will not discuss former employees, period, for fear of getting sued
big-time for lost wages.

I've had that happen to me. I ended up working just
above minimum wage in a stuffy call center. Luckily, my skills were
enough to overcome this problem and I went to work for a company with a
much better outlook on life. As to top versus bottom posting, take a
look at the RFC. It really does not address the problem, but it gives
something more valuable, guidance.

This goes beyond the RFC, it's about what a reasonable expectation for
an English-literate person is.

However, things are better now than they were a month ago and they will
continue to get better.

So the forum's going away? That's about the only way things could get
unequivocally better.

--
Paul Johnson
[email protected]

[vitamin]

Closing this thread in forum
Paul Johnson please stop spamming. All off topic -> /dev/null