Active Members?
- Thread starter Liam
- Start date
I'm also seriously worried about all those jolly "hi!" messages in the Introduce Yourself section, where one person says he's from Lalaland, and many give the vaguest of reasons why they are interested in joining a literary forum, and rather odd jobs, such as an "officer from Luxembourg" although not stating whether he is working for the airforce, navy, or army (or simply means "civil servant"). Several entries smack of spam, but it would be a pity to drive people away just because they cannot express themselves very well in the language of this forum, English. And people who have a lot of numbers in their sobriquet, or some unpronouncable thing with y, q, x, z and lacking other vowels, also smack of spam.
Luckily, Stewart has begun to challenge such people. All you have to do is ask them a couple of innocuous questions about their interests in literature, and they fall silent.
I think the introductions should be just that. The people should at least say which country they are from and which specific areas of literature interest them. This would not breach the habit of anonymity that has been built up here (although I don't really know why) but would give the rest of us some idea what types of people are joining.
You might think me rude in not welcoming everyone on the introductions thread, but I feel I would sometimes be welcoming a chimera, spammer, or, to use a sophisticated term borrowed from criticism, pain in the arse who feels it his duty to destroy and disrupt what others build up.
One thing I've noticed that also smacks of spam is when one of these suspicious types posts his gobbledegook, the number of non-registered people shoots up to about 10 for that thread, when normally only about two people would be looking at the same time.
Luckily, Stewart has begun to challenge such people. All you have to do is ask them a couple of innocuous questions about their interests in literature, and they fall silent.
I think the introductions should be just that. The people should at least say which country they are from and which specific areas of literature interest them. This would not breach the habit of anonymity that has been built up here (although I don't really know why) but would give the rest of us some idea what types of people are joining.
You might think me rude in not welcoming everyone on the introductions thread, but I feel I would sometimes be welcoming a chimera, spammer, or, to use a sophisticated term borrowed from criticism, pain in the arse who feels it his duty to destroy and disrupt what others build up.
One thing I've noticed that also smacks of spam is when one of these suspicious types posts his gobbledegook, the number of non-registered people shoots up to about 10 for that thread, when normally only about two people would be looking at the same time.
Well, I've implemented some changes to registration, as regards human verification process. It turns out Google's reCAPTCHA system that I was using was finally cracked by spammers this year, hence the upturn in spam. Hopefully this method will reduce the signups and then, with users' first twenty posts scanned for links and held in moderation, the automated spam will be greatly reduced. There's an plugin for the forum that I'm looking at too, that will cross reference sign-ups against a known spammer database and deny registration if found to be nasty. Just waiting for that to be updated for compatibility with this version of the forum software.
"Human verification" sounds like something from sci-fi. But I presume you mean those distorted letters in a box that humans but not scanners can read and reproduce. It must be a tricky business policing such a forum as this, because as I suggested in my previous posting, you don't get off to a good start with a new member if you are already accusing them of being a spammer. Nevertheless, people (mostly male, I would imagine) do exist whose interest in any forum is what they can get away with, rather than what they can contribute. It's a sort of narcissistic game where the spammer thinks "how much garbage can I post before they notice I'm not really one of them?".
Those distorted letters are the reCAPTCHA (Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart), which is a great idea, given its two purposes (human verification and also using people to decipher words on old texts to improve digital books), but this failsafe appears to have been cracked by spammers/hackers.
So now, when I say human verification, I just mean asking very simple questions during the registration process that a computer programme wouldn't be likely to answer. Seems to have been working. There were a couple of signups overnight, that were spam, but certainly nowhere near recent levels.
This system is bound to cracked by hackers. That's what hackers are for. There must be a limited number of ways of distorting the shape letters electronically. Consequently a devoted hacker, who has no other interests in life (e.g. literature) can spend hours devising a programme to imitate the curvy coding.
One hilarious bit of password nonchalance I read about just now was perpetrated by that sophisticated ex-hacker Julian Assange, who gave the Guardian a "temporary" password to a huge number of American military or diplomatic documents stolen by Manning, and then, er, forgot to change the password later on. Some Guardian journos wrote the password in their book on the Wikis, and although books take months to put together and publish, Assange was no doubt too permanently pissed at his stately home in Norfolk to remember that he had not changed the password.
Maybe Assange could leave the codes to nuclear missiles lying around while he's at it, so that WWIII can be started by some hacker messing about with military hacking in Iran and the USA at the same time and sets off a bundle of rockets from each country. You don't need terrorists where you've got dumbos.
One hilarious bit of password nonchalance I read about just now was perpetrated by that sophisticated ex-hacker Julian Assange, who gave the Guardian a "temporary" password to a huge number of American military or diplomatic documents stolen by Manning, and then, er, forgot to change the password later on. Some Guardian journos wrote the password in their book on the Wikis, and although books take months to put together and publish, Assange was no doubt too permanently pissed at his stately home in Norfolk to remember that he had not changed the password.
Maybe Assange could leave the codes to nuclear missiles lying around while he's at it, so that WWIII can be started by some hacker messing about with military hacking in Iran and the USA at the same time and sets off a bundle of rockets from each country. You don't need terrorists where you've got dumbos.
I think that a little more policing of these threads is necessary. There are people who jump into threads with both feet and appear to then wallow around shouting, mud-slinging, and wrecking. We can all get drunk at three in the morning, but the thought "I must think twice before I post this great idea of mine because I'm pissed and may regret it tomorrow morning" should cross the minds of posters. And as with rioters anywhere, if they persist, they should be stopped.
Rumpelstilzchen
Former Member
what happened?
Rumpelstilzchen
Former Member
Now, I see, Nobel prize and Japanese films... It is really silly Eric. Digressions just happen naturally in any discussion. You are vilifying people for no good reason and you are exaggerating things. Let me show you just one quote from YOUR posts of the last few days in the same thread and let me ask you, what the hell this has to do with Nobel Prize speculation? You see, it happens to everybody. This is a forum, not a police state.
Yes, Anchomal, Hiroshima and Nagasaki must never be forgotten. But the Japanese were no angels during WWII. They had suicide bombers (Pearl Harbor) and had horrible concentration camps, just like the German Nazis, which Dutch, Indonesian, and British prisoners were witness to.
One of the hardest decisions to be made during a war is surely whether to use a weapon of mass destruction, e.g. an atom bomb (Hiroshima, Nagasaki) or fire-bombing (Dresden) to achieve one's goals when you know 100% certain that innocent men, women and children will die. But calculations will no doubt be made about what would happen if the war continued for another five years, and how many further millions would die.
After all, when it comes to the horrors of Dresden, well documented by Kurt Vonnegut who was there, we must remember that the German Nazis, systematically and sadistically, reduced the city of Coventry in England to rubble, street by street, early in the war. This wasn't the jolly old bombing of munitions factories, this was a deliberate form of terror warfare. The Allies were on the right side of morality; whether Dresden was revenge or scare tactics is hard to tell. But the British, French, Scandinavians, etc., did not start that destructive war.
Nor were the Russians angels. They had been stupid enough to let a Georgian psychopath take over their country, who set about killing all the best Russian generals in his usual paranoid Gaddafi-like way during the 1930s. So, when he realised that Nazi Germany was a real threat, he disingenuously pretended to be nice to the Germans by signing the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact making Germany friends with Russia (aka the Soviet Union). So a lot of Russian Communists didn't know where they were. One day Nazi Germany was the enemy, the next, a great friend. So when we read all those books about the poor old Russians at Stalingrad or the Siege of Leningrad (70th anniversary the day after tomorrow) don't blame the German Nazis for all of it. The Russians were asking for it by being ill equipped for war. This makes Chamberlain's "this piece of paper means peace in our time" or whatever he said, look like minor theatricals and punning. Because Britain too was ill equipped. But Chamberlain had not had Montgomery and other key generals shot.
What puzzles me is like just now when it says at the bottom of the page that there are 23 viewing. I'm the only actual member but there are 22 guests, although only about five people are marked on the home page of the WLF. A minute later, there's only me. Then there are 17 guests, depending on which part of the website you are looking. How come these people all logged out at the same time?
Apfelwurm implies I was going off-topic. No doubt. But I was replying to Anchomal. We should indeed start a new thread about the Second World War and who is to blame, because nowadays, the number of people alive during that war is diminishing rapidly, and even those from my generation, people who have heard experiences from their parents, is also getting smaller.
Soon we will have a generation who hasn't the slightest idea abouut WWII, nor about the Russian Communist domination of half of Europe with its inefficient system of shortages, censorship and labour camps. Soon these horrors will become another quick-flick page of ten soundbite points in school history books.
A lot of the blame for WWII must be that of the Germans and Russians because of Hitler and Stalin and the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact.
I will start a thread on this very topic and not mention it again on the Nobel speculation thread. But let it not be forgotten that several Nobel prizewinners for literature have won the prize because of what happened during the Second World War and its aftermath, e.g. Kertész, Müller, Grass, Singer, Sholokhov, Churchill, Solzhenitsyn and Milosz.
Soon we will have a generation who hasn't the slightest idea abouut WWII, nor about the Russian Communist domination of half of Europe with its inefficient system of shortages, censorship and labour camps. Soon these horrors will become another quick-flick page of ten soundbite points in school history books.
A lot of the blame for WWII must be that of the Germans and Russians because of Hitler and Stalin and the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact.
I will start a thread on this very topic and not mention it again on the Nobel speculation thread. But let it not be forgotten that several Nobel prizewinners for literature have won the prize because of what happened during the Second World War and its aftermath, e.g. Kertész, Müller, Grass, Singer, Sholokhov, Churchill, Solzhenitsyn and Milosz.
By the way, I do hope that those trolls that try to wreck communication on websites such as this one take note:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/ukn...d-for-mocking-dead-teenagers-on-Facebook.html
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/ukn...d-for-mocking-dead-teenagers-on-Facebook.html
Here's the same story in the Guardian and Helsingin Sanomat:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2011/sep/13/internet-troll-jailed-mocking-teenagers
http://www.hs.fi/ulkomaat/artikkeli...ilaillut+vankilaan+Britanniassa/1135269344931
The story is slowly spreading through the whole of Europe. I do hope that the German press has something about it.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2011/sep/13/internet-troll-jailed-mocking-teenagers
http://www.hs.fi/ulkomaat/artikkeli...ilaillut+vankilaan+Britanniassa/1135269344931
The story is slowly spreading through the whole of Europe. I do hope that the German press has something about it.
"guest" in a forum like this just means someone viewing the page. It could be just anyone who happened along, surfing the net. I think it also includes searchbots from google and other search engines, crawling the pages to do indexing.
This forum doesn't seem to suffer much from trolling. It mostly seems to be commercial stuff, adverts and links hidden in seemingly relevant messages.
Elie
Reader
I hardly think that anything happening on this forum is quite on that level, Eric.
Eric: I am usually logged in as a guest, for example, since I very rarely actually respond to threads. I am mostly a lurker, though I visit the forum on at least a weekly basis. I use this forum mostly as a means of learning about new writers and seeing people's opinions of writers I already am familiar with. I almost never feel the need to get into discussions (often, I see people in a particular thread expressing the exact same or extremely similar opinion that I would were I to post, and I don't feel the need to clog threads with "Me toos" and the like). I imagine there are others like me who use this forum more passively, and would add to the "guest" viewing count.
EDIT: Fixed a typo
EDIT: Oops, I just realized that I responded to a thread that has been dead for over a month. My apologies.
EDIT: Fixed a typo
EDIT: Oops, I just realized that I responded to a thread that has been dead for over a month. My apologies.