Apologies, but we've been catching a lot of spam recently on some older articles. They're often 10-15 pages back, so I doubt if anyone's bothered. We are taking them down as we find them.
I don't suppose there's a (convenient, perhaps even automatic) way to turn off comments on posts more than a week or two old? Legitimate comments on old posts probably are pretty rare, and if someone really, really wanted to start the conversation up again, they could always create a new post with a link to the old one.
There is exactly that function. We had it on for months until a longtime community member had a bit of a fit because he/she had been trying to reply to some comments others had left. This was a 2 week old post and we pointed out the reason for turning off comments.
But rather than take any more abuse we just turned it off. Still, no hard feelings. We'd rather scope out spam than open ourselves up for new entries for Real Goddamned Mail.
"Does anyone look that far back (other than a longtime community member)???"
Perhaps prospective new members pore through the back catalog, as I have been doing for several weeks, to get a sense of the place and to gain from the immense collective wisdom contained herein. Seriously, you folks have helped me in my endeavors more than I can express.
My supposition is that when a spambot finds an accepting forum, it will step up its activity and others will soon follow, with a positive feedback effect that could kill the forum. To curtail this, directing comments on older posts into a moderation queue seems like a good compromise. The number of "legit" comments delayed by this is likely to be small and manageable, and delaying them by a few hours is less consequential when the real-time conversation has long since cooled off. Case in point is this comment itself: only a few might ever read it, and there is statistically little chance that someone would land on this page between my posting this comment and its passage through the queue. If it takes a day to appear, it would have missed vanishingly few of its intended audience.
However, the small additional perspective I have added might be appreciated by the aforementioned someone reading the "historical documents", so I am glad that comments on old posts are not just summarily dumped.
mmmmm ... canned luncheon "meat"
ReplyDeleteI don't suppose there's a (convenient, perhaps even automatic) way to turn off comments on posts more than a week or two old? Legitimate comments on old posts probably are pretty rare, and if someone really, really wanted to start the conversation up again, they could always create a new post with a link to the old one.
ReplyDeleteThere is exactly that function. We had it on for months until a longtime community member had a bit of a fit because he/she had been trying to reply to some comments others had left. This was a 2 week old post and we pointed out the reason for turning off comments.
DeleteBut rather than take any more abuse we just turned it off. Still, no hard feelings. We'd rather scope out spam than open ourselves up for new entries for Real Goddamned Mail.
I can't imagine going back to reply to something two weeks later. Does anyone look that far back (other than a longtime community member)???
DeleteThere are some folks who keep tabs on their old posts.
Delete"Does anyone look that far back (other than a longtime community member)???"
ReplyDeletePerhaps prospective new members pore through the back catalog, as I have been doing for several weeks, to get a sense of the place and to gain from the immense collective wisdom contained herein. Seriously, you folks have helped me in my endeavors more than I can express.
My supposition is that when a spambot finds an accepting forum, it will step up its activity and others will soon follow, with a positive feedback effect that could kill the forum. To curtail this, directing comments on older posts into a moderation queue seems like a good compromise. The number of "legit" comments delayed by this is likely to be small and manageable, and delaying them by a few hours is less consequential when the real-time conversation has long since cooled off. Case in point is this comment itself: only a few might ever read it, and there is statistically little chance that someone would land on this page between my posting this comment and its passage through the queue. If it takes a day to appear, it would have missed vanishingly few of its intended audience.
However, the small additional perspective I have added might be appreciated by the aforementioned someone reading the "historical documents", so I am glad that comments on old posts are not just summarily dumped.