If you decide to delete your account, contact me.

[TimothyEllis]

I've turned off the ability for people to delete their own account and all their posts.

Every time this happens, I find whole threads missing, where the deleted username was the OP on the thread.

Until I can find a way (read coder) to split off the first post when this happens, so threads are preserved when usernames are deleted, anyone wishing to delete their account will need to contact me to get it done.

I'm also not happy with the proliferation of guest**** posts, so have turned that off as well, until it also can be handled in a better way. They become ghost posts, which cause their own problems.

If you ask me to delete your account, I will split off any threads where you are the first post, and then delete the account with all it's posts.

[DanielToisa]

What measures are in place to ensure that the moderators maintain a fair and unbiased approach towards enforcing forum rules, especially considering the recent changes and potential influx of new users in the forum's better accommodations?

[TimothyEllis]

What measures are in place to ensure that the moderators maintain a fair and unbiased approach towards enforcing forum rules, especially considering the recent changes and potential influx of new users in the forum's better accommodations?

That's a strange question.

There've been no changes here in several years.

And there've been no moderators here since 2019. We haven't needed them.

Most of the new users recently have turned out to be spammers, and been deleted.

The majority of the rest are not posting, just reading.

Or are yet to identify themselves as spammers.

[Bill Hiatt]

Given that I hardly ever see spam, it appears that the system is working well.

[TimothyEllis]

Given that I hardly ever see spam, it appears that the system is working well.

It seems to.

Lately I've had more to do, but the spammers don't appear to realize that in 4 clicks, I can get rid of them and everything they try to post.

I'm having to delete a lot of registration attempts as well, as most seem to not get the forum emails, so they never actually sign in. I'm being a bit ruthless with them at the moment.

One issue is gmail seems to be spam blocking the forum too. So some genuine attempts to register might not be happening.

[Bill Hiatt]

Unfortunately, the internet has long been a place where bots will try to create accounts anywhere there's a space, just in case the account can become a way to propagate spam.

When I was still teaching, I had an problem with a company providing supplemental classroom websites. It forgot to activate the anti-spam precautions. So instead of just having my students sign up (which would have been about 120 people at the time, I woke up one morning to find I had over a thousand "people" signed up. The bots had no knowledge of geography and just put together random locations on the signup, so that someone might claim to be located in Las Vegas, Nigeria or Istanbul, Finland. Once the company clamped down, all was well. But it illustrates that uncontrolled sites get flooded very quickly.

[Post-Crisis D]

Once the company clamped down, all was well. But it illustrates that uncontrolled sites get flooded very quickly.

The challenge is blocking spam while not terribly inconveniencing legitimate users.  There are some sites I don't/can't use anymore because I can't get past their anti-spam procedures.  They probably don't miss me.  But, whether I am building a site for eCommerce or for my books, I don't want a single legitimate user to slip away.  I'd rather get some spam than block a real person from contacting me or making a purchase.

[Bill Hiatt]

There's always a balance, true.

If it's just a site to display your books, there are limits to what bots can do. If you allow comments, it's easy enough to moderate them and prevent spam manually unless you have huge traffic. An ecommerce site might be trickier, but more because of what hacks against the guts of the site might cause rather than what a frontend user might do.

If I recall, you do your own programming, which gives you the advantage of structuring security how you want. I'm reliant on others, but generally, I have a site that functions well without excessive security routines. The only thing that irks me a little is that when CloudFlare updated recently, I find myself verifying I'm a human every time. It's just a checkbox, but still, I could probably do without. But if I wanted to, I could lower the security there and rely on my other precautions (like WordFence on the site itself). So far, my legit traffic hasn't dwindled.