A forum review has been conducted and the Commercial Editor of CandM has discovered that some member's posts contain inappropriate references to commercial entities in the form of website links (URLs).
Accordingly some forum rules have been added, here - http://www.candm.com.au/forum/viewtopic ... 30&t=11016
Admin over time will contact and advise relevant members of the requirement to edit their signatures and/or the need for judicious use of commercial links or references within their posts.
Below are the rules relating to member signatures and posts:
Members Signature:
URLs may form part of a member's signature.
The URL is to be limited to the minimum size required for it to function and not be embellished by style, size or comment.
The URL must not point to a deemed or perceived commercial website. Admin shall remain the sole arbiter.
Members Posts:
Members may not advertise directly or by referring to another website, or include a URL for advertising purpose within their post *1
A member may infrequently refer to commercially related material and/or imbed a URL within a post providing it is in legitimate discussion and there are no commercial obligations or benefits from the post.
Reiteration. A member may not make any reference within their post to a URL contained within their signature.
*1 This requirement does not apply in the Forum Wanted/Swap area to members wishing to buy/sell items for/of their own personal use.
Cheers,
Ash
Rules & Notices - July 2013
Update - July 2013
Hi, just a bit of an update for everyone.
Membership application
We have had a great deal of Spam or malicious applications for membership over many months. These amount to approximately 150 per day. I have to examine each application and decide whether it is valid or just an attempt to gain access to post advertising, malicious information or just be a general nuisance. In the past any membership application could not be completed with passing the Captcha test. That is the applicant is presented with some hard to read letters or numbers that only a human can understand. This process is supposed to fool computers but is easily completed by a human. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CAPTCHA
As so much Spam was getting through I didn't know whether this was because there were lots of people willing to make manual applications and pass the Captcha test each time or someone had developed clever computer processes that could decipher Captcha images. I decided to make a change and turn off Captcha and turn on the simple question and answer alternative. To make it a bit harder I wrote some questions that would be easy for an Aussie to answer but harder for non-locals. Nearly all Spam comes from outside of Australia and during our overnight period.
After a trial period of 9 days I am extremely pleased to report that Spam has dropped to zero. That's right, instead of receiving approximately 1300 malicious applications in that period it dropped to none at all. The rate of legitimate new member applications continues at about 125 per month. You can check this yourself by clicking here http://www.candm.com.au/forum/memberlis ... &sk=c&sd=d
If you click on the column heading Joined it will reverse the sort order to oldest first. This applies to other columns. Username will sort in alphabetical order and Posts will sort in post count. By clicking on Joined so that the most recent is shown you can click on Next in the bottom right hand corner. Keep doing this until you find the same day but in the previous month. For example today is the July 19 and when you find June 19 look to the left and you will see a member number of about 125. So this means 125 new members have joined in the past month, or about 30 per week.
Edit timeout
After you create a new post there is a limited time that you can edit that post. When Simon was Admin boss he set that to 5 minutes. I thought that was too restrictive and a few months ago reset it to 15 minutes. I am also looking into why the delete post option is not available but need help from the IT guys. When working this also has a 5 minute timeout but it allows a poster to delete a new post but only if there have been no replies.
Reporting a post
Recently I congratulated members on their good form in that for many months no posts have been reported for the reasons of bad taste, inflammatory, etc. I did say that a few were regularly reported for administrative reasons and nearly always because they were placed in the wrong area. I thought the existing report reasons did not properly reflect this so I added a new one called "Wrong Topic area" and made it first in the list.
Cheers
Membership application
We have had a great deal of Spam or malicious applications for membership over many months. These amount to approximately 150 per day. I have to examine each application and decide whether it is valid or just an attempt to gain access to post advertising, malicious information or just be a general nuisance. In the past any membership application could not be completed with passing the Captcha test. That is the applicant is presented with some hard to read letters or numbers that only a human can understand. This process is supposed to fool computers but is easily completed by a human. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CAPTCHA
As so much Spam was getting through I didn't know whether this was because there were lots of people willing to make manual applications and pass the Captcha test each time or someone had developed clever computer processes that could decipher Captcha images. I decided to make a change and turn off Captcha and turn on the simple question and answer alternative. To make it a bit harder I wrote some questions that would be easy for an Aussie to answer but harder for non-locals. Nearly all Spam comes from outside of Australia and during our overnight period.
After a trial period of 9 days I am extremely pleased to report that Spam has dropped to zero. That's right, instead of receiving approximately 1300 malicious applications in that period it dropped to none at all. The rate of legitimate new member applications continues at about 125 per month. You can check this yourself by clicking here http://www.candm.com.au/forum/memberlis ... &sk=c&sd=d
If you click on the column heading Joined it will reverse the sort order to oldest first. This applies to other columns. Username will sort in alphabetical order and Posts will sort in post count. By clicking on Joined so that the most recent is shown you can click on Next in the bottom right hand corner. Keep doing this until you find the same day but in the previous month. For example today is the July 19 and when you find June 19 look to the left and you will see a member number of about 125. So this means 125 new members have joined in the past month, or about 30 per week.
Edit timeout
After you create a new post there is a limited time that you can edit that post. When Simon was Admin boss he set that to 5 minutes. I thought that was too restrictive and a few months ago reset it to 15 minutes. I am also looking into why the delete post option is not available but need help from the IT guys. When working this also has a 5 minute timeout but it allows a poster to delete a new post but only if there have been no replies.
Reporting a post
Recently I congratulated members on their good form in that for many months no posts have been reported for the reasons of bad taste, inflammatory, etc. I did say that a few were regularly reported for administrative reasons and nearly always because they were placed in the wrong area. I thought the existing report reasons did not properly reflect this so I added a new one called "Wrong Topic area" and made it first in the list.
Cheers
Clancy (Global Moderator)
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