"Permanent" ban

For what it’s worth, what bcressey wrote was (in my book) a sincere apology and a retraction of the part which offended me. A part of the traffic routed through Tor is child pornography. I would assume that to be true, as a part of the traffic routed through the Internet is child pornography. So I don’t really see how that can be considered an offensive statement (unless anyone added the ‘logical conclusion’ that therefore, the Internet as a whole is evil and should be shut down). I4L, on the other hand, is welcome to BCC all his emails to me in the future, because unless he is up to something illegal or ‘immoral’, he wouldn’t have anything to hide, would he?

P.S. “But that’s just my opinion” does not make personal insults and insinuations better. On the contrary: It’s one of the most annoying trends in discussion culture as it somehow seems to imply that logical reasoning based on facts is completely unnecessary and even if someone else does it, it can be dismissed by adding that statement.

IMO, Tor is only useful for people who would get shot in the head by secret police if they didn’t use it. Human rights activists in North Korea come to mind.

For everybody else, it’s probably just a way to do something illegal (including spam) or for the crazies to “feel safe” due to paranoia.

I move for locking this thread.

I don’t object. The more exposure I get to the views of members of this community on digital rights, the more challenging it becomes to find a way to rationalise not just writing everybody off as unfrozen cavemen from 1993.

Paul.

Don’t worry - I consider the proposal duly enterred. If people don’t like it it is a bad idea. The following is just about correcting the spelling on the epitaph.

My idea was rather to have a set of tiny IFs, chosen by a random number generator seeded with the proposed login name, giving access to exactly that name (maybe with a code valid for that name, I hadn’t thought of that way to do do it). Once such a name were barred, one would have to play a probably different game again to get a new code for a new name. And all randomness within the game would be different too, as the generator would be differently seeded. So no sharing of results, or even of walkthroughs, would be useful.
The deeper idea behind it was that once the number of links publishable per hour falls below a certain treshhold, spamming would become unprofitable - or at the least less profitable than spamming elsewhere.
No puzzles would be needed (it might even provide an introduction to, say, the BB rules and mores), just a time delay that would be annoying/profit-killing to spammers but enjoyable by IF aficionados. And that latter part is exactly why the idea is dead: it seems people wouldn’t enjoy it.

Deleting this whole long post. It doesn’t matter anymore what my opinions on the subject are.

I logged in from work today and got this message:

I must say that the wording of the message is a little alarming. What alarmed me the most is that I had logged in from work the day before.

I take it more IPs were banned recently which resulted in me no longer being able to check from work.

Susan

I’ve only issued a handful of IP bans since this discussion came up last, and only in the most egregious cases.

I’m not sure why you saw this message; I’ve checked all the IP addresses you’ve posted from and none of them should be affected by the current banlist.

Maybe work changed something on their side.

Susan

Gosh. I would have guessed the amount of work to keep the spam at bay would be much lower. Thus, even if it may be a little bit off-topic: Many, many compliments to all who are working to keep this board clean.

If I log into this board using the HotSpot Shield VPN, I get the permanent ban message as well.

Wouldn’t a simple Captcha gateway for signing up new users cut down on most of these without affecting existing users in the slightest, or new real humans very much at all? I understand they’re easy to slot into existing forum systems these days, as well.

I suspect most of the spam comes from actual people hired to create forum accounts and give the credentials to bots that handle the rest.

That’s my feeling as well. Even text questions, which in theory aren’t already listed anywhere and should take a human to understand, don’t seem to prevent it. I’m pretty sure this forum (and thousands of others) are on some kind of master list for spammers, and they just send a person down the list signing up everywhere.

We just need questions that only a junior-level IF enthusiast would be able to answer: “To enter the forum, please complete the phrase – ‘It is pirch black. You are likely to be eaten by a ____.’”

On the ADRIFT forum there is very little spam, as the first post of any new member has to be signed off by a moderator. Whilst this might put off a very small amount of people, in practice it works very well for the spam levels.

How many people new to the scene wouldn’t know the answer was a grue?

Probably a few (but, y’know, if you can’t count on an obvious reference from the most famous IF ever, what can you fall back on?) however I can virtually guarantee that the amount of canine fellatio images beaming from this forum to my workplace would drop to zero. That’s always the question: how many casual new users too tenuous to Google a question are you willing to throw under the train in order to avoid the plague of canine fellation? (Am I the only one with fond memories of New User Password cheat sheets enabling quick access to underground BBSes?)

An alternate humble proposal: make new user validation reliant on a password arrived at through playthrough of one of two very simple (one-room) games presented in either the old parser form or hyperfiction style. So, you want to join this forum: then play this game! What an onerous requirement.

Hopefully we will soon be integrating Akismet into the forum. :slight_smile:

Nothing. Asking culture-specific questions will never work right. Spammers can google, and newcomers don’t always. Requiring newcomers to go through extra hoops is equally bad – it’s a blatant “go away, we don’t want you” sign.

(The web captcha-widget has become familiar enough to be acceptable, so you might be able to get away with a one-move IF “game” that appears inline in the registration page. But again, there’s no reason to think that spammers can’t do that.)