Ectocomp 2013

I think there’s precedent, too, since Tale got spam-filtered last year and was added anyway.

Oh, man, the phone books are here. The phone books are here. Oh man are the phone books ever here. I was guessing 15 entreies.

Mostly Useless’s game is hereby appended to the list of Ectocomp entries. I will update the list this evening when the webpage goes live. I found your email in the Spam folder, which I should have checked - I’m sorry. For your information here is the reason supplied by Gmail as to why your messages were spammed:

I love Gmail’s response there. That’s a bit like saying “I’ve heard some French people are thieves, so therefore all French people must be thieves.” Classic!

Teeeeny request for next year. Maybe put each game in its own subfolder, with zipped entries unzipped into their own? That way, one unzip puts everything in place, ready for play. [emote]:)[/emote]

I would have never predicted our little Halloween Speed-IF would have almost as many entries as IF Comp. Congratulations! I said probably between ten and seventeen, but it was even more! I guess our Haunted House is even scarier this time!

We are in no position here on intfiction.org to point and laugh at such a maneuver. This forum engages in the very same sort of thinking regarding anonymous proxy users. There is a whole lot of this sort of thinking going around these days online, actually, barely any of it justified by the achievement of any actual results in reduction of the unwanted behaviour, but almost all of it exacting collateral damage and unintended consequences.

It’s certainly a catch-22. Without trap-all policies in place, the forum (and Gmail too, I would think) would become an unusable mess where legit stuff is buried under piles of garbage. I guess it’s not entirely apples to apples, considering that email is a more personal space where you kind of want to make your own decisions about what does and doesn’t get through. But until spam-blocking becomes some kind of real AI – or we all hire a real live somebody to filter the spam for us – it’s kind of, IMO, a necessary evil.

In the case of this forum, I think we at least have seen a reduction in the unwanted behavior; the one specific person this was targeted at hasn’t been back (much?)

Oh no! I’m getting the same error. The version on Sumana’s site seems to work fine for me, though:
panix.com/~sumanah/personalityrights.html

Huh. Well, did you get the email about those ■■■■■■ pills I’m selling?

Thanks for comping me! Good luck, everyone!

I emailed Jason. He said there will be an update later today, to include the missing game and presumably fix the one that’s broken (bad .zip). There were also a couple of listing problems (one game without both authors listed, and one with a mistake in the title). With permission, I fixed those two things in the announcement that was posted here. Presumably they’ll be fixed in the voting file tonight. After he’s off work. [emote]:)[/emote]

So we maybe stifled one troll (who possibly just got bored of shenanigans for the time being) at the cost of barring at least one legitimate user (that we know of), which seems pretty far from worth it even if I hadn’t just read on another thread that in addition to the anonymous proxy blocking, apparently all newbie posts now have to be pre-approved by a moderator…? Wow. Every time I go away and come back I find this place wound up a little tighter.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FaaBvBgQbh8

I didn’t say it was worth it. But honestly, Pudlo was becoming disruptive enough that it was worth it, with apologies to Hannes.

I think pre-approving newbie posts had to do with a flood of spam, and that problem has also been seriously reduced.

Certainly there are major costs here, but if we want a laissez-faire approach we could go back to RAIF – which I think died because between the trolls and the spammers it was basically a river of shit that wasn’t worth panning in.

I think the fact that posts now have to be pre-approved for new accounts proves pretty conclusively that anonymous proxy blocking doesn’t and didn’t work. If it worked to keep out unwanted behaviour, then there is no way such a drastic step as pre-moderation would have been necessary or even contemplated.

EDIT: And now that pre-approval is in place, why is anonymous proxy blocking still on? You don’t need to block proxies just because they’re anonymous, only because there is bad behaviour. ANd if you are pre-screening for bad behaviour, then blocking proxies is just pointless. Seriously it’s like the keystone kops around here.

Sean M. Shore, I feel like we’ve just come from creepy parallel dimensions…

I can’t remember the rules. Are entrants disqualified from judging entirely, or just from judging their own pieces?

I was wondering that myself. I’ve already played three of them (spot checked most of the others just for an initial impression). I’ve been making notes/mini-reviews on the judging form, but not assigning any scores. I’m kind of thinking I won’t vote, even if we can, and I probably won’t even give out scores. I think every game is likely to be a little rough and buggy, just given the restrictions of the competition, and I kind of don’t want to score low based on brevity and bugs or score high based on an allowance for the time limit.

I saw your title and was wondering if we’d hit on the same idea. I haven’t played yours yet, or anyone’s – work is a nightmare today.

If the entrants can’t vote, are there any eligible voters left?