Spammers....

[CommonTater]

Is there no way to keep the spammers out of here?
 
It's getting just a bit ridiculous.
 

[David L Morris]

I would say the process of member registration and validation could be improved before any posts by the new member are allowed? 

[Bitbeisser]

I would say the process of member registration and validation could be improved before any posts by the new member are allowed?

There are actual people signing up and posting their crap, it's nothing you can stop with anything beyond a basic deterrence for bots. I know this out of my own practical experience of being for years now an admin for a somewhat high volume forum (community.smoothwall.org) myself.

What might be needed are a a few more vigil (but not vigilante) moderators that can remove those crap posts as well have the means to remove/suspend offending accounts as well as blocking signup/posting from offending IPs. If this is done quickly in each case, "they" quickly loose interest.

This is where the current setup and procedures in this forum are lacking. "modemjane" for example is still a legitimate user in this forum, signed up since 2011-11-11 (at least that what the member list shows) and is still free to spam at any time, nothing that any stricter signup procedure could possibly prevent. And stricter validation before posting will certainly deter possibly newbies that come in here to post their latest homework issues, which we do have quite frequently and I am not sure that we should kick them out...

Ralf

[CommonTater]

And stricter validation before posting will certainly deter possibly newbies that come in here to post their latest homework issues, which we do have quite frequently and I am not sure that we should kick them out...

Hi Ralf!

I'm highly active on a much higher volume forum than this one which has extra precautions in it's signup and settings changes processes.  Believe me, it doesn't stop the kiddies from asking us to do their homework for them    Most of them are so used to bot-stoppers they don't even give it a thought.

[W4GNS]

Well, I certainly hope more can be done to slow/stop the spamming. It's not entirely out of control on this forum, but none is better than some, as far as spam is concerned. 

[MrBcx]

I'm one of several moderators on this board and I can say the amount of spam has definitely been on the rise. 
I want to thank everyone who reports the spam when they encounter it.  Moderators receive a personal email
with a link to the offending post, so that we can remove it and ban the sender pretty easily. So, even when spam
gets in, we're usually pretty responsive about ridding it from the forum.

[CommonTater]

I'm one of several moderators on this board and I can say the amount of spam has definitely been on the rise. 
I want to thank everyone who reports the spam when they encounter it.  Moderators receive a personal email
with a link to the offending post, so that we can remove it and ban the sender pretty easily. So, even when spam
gets in, we're usually pretty responsive about ridding it from the forum.

I'll give you that... you do a pretty good job and I'm overall happy with the way things go here... Some amazing people use this forum!

It's just, as you say the levels of spam have been climbing of late.  It's almost like this forum has become a testbed for bots and ad-droppers...

I was just hoping there was a measure you could take to stop it outright, as other forums do.

[Bitbeisser]

I'm one of several moderators on this board and I can say the amount of spam has definitely been on the rise. 
I want to thank everyone who reports the spam when they encounter it.  Moderators receive a personal email
with a link to the offending post, so that we can remove it and ban the sender pretty easily. So, even when spam
gets in, we're usually pretty responsive about ridding it from the forum.

Ahmmm,.....

Well, and why are still all the posts of this slobipiebribe moron still around? 
And modemjane still a registered user?

Ralf

[frankie]

Unfortunately we can just cancel posts, we cannot admin users (as you said bitbeisser).
And Christian, the administrator, seem not present enough in the last times.
Moreover Pelle seem to have loose interests on this forum, and, sad to say, I agree with him. This forum seems getting more and more an homework helping center.
There are Very few technical and interesting discussions. The level is going so basic that it is natural to attract unexperienced users only. This is clearly evident considering the contributions and tips&tricks sections, in which from long time there have been no additions.

[Bitbeisser]

Unfortunately we can just cancel posts, we cannot admin users (as you said bitbeisser).
And Christian, the administrator, seem not present enough in the last times.

Well, this is something I think should change. If Christian himself can't be around all the time (which is only fair, everyone has RL issues), some of the moderators should get some elevated permissions to perform such task in obvious spammer cases...

Moreover Pelle seem to have loose interests on this forum, and, sad to say, I agree with him. This forum seems getting more and more an homework helping center.

Pelle has never been very active in this forum. And it is hard to say for anyone but himself as to why that is...

Honestly, I do not think that the occasional dude "looking for homework help" is causing a disinterest, at least not more as the more or less constant spam posts...

What IMHO is much more of a problem is the fact there isn't much "movement" in the way bug reports are being "honored" and updates are being released. It is a long time ago that Pelle has commented on any of the posted bug reports, even posting to debunk a certain "bug" would show some interest.
For people that are intending to use Pelle's C for more than just a hobby or for learning (Windows) programming, this doesn't instill a lot of confidence in this project. And with Pelle being the only "keeper of the grail", we have a chicken and egg problem at best... :-(

Ralf

[CommonTater]

Hi Ralf...

I'm afaid I have to come down on your side of this one.

I do think a little better moderator control would help on the forums... 

However it's your second point that's hit a cord...
I am one of those people who use Pelles C as a primary language when coding --on several large projects-- and I do have to say that it is rather distressing to see entire years go by without any announcements or updates.  It's starting to look like it's becoming abandonware and that's not good. 

Now for clarity, I'm not a big fan of "scheduled updates". I believe in the old saying: "If it ain't broke don't fix it"... but there are some outstanding bugs and minor issues that do not seem to be getting addressed right now, which does cause some concern. 

I've probably looked at every free compiler and every free IDE you can get --and a few that weren't free-- thinking it may be time to move on... But I keep ending up back on POIDE and Pelles C simply because it is, without question, the best implementation of C99 you can get.  No other setup gives you an "all in one place" solution that just works...

When you add up the IDE, the documentation, the compiler itself and all those resource tools, you get a wonderfully helpful and useful coding environment.  It will be a real shame if Pelles C ends up abandoned. 

I definately appreciate Pelle's work on this over the years (I've been with this since version 2.0) it's an amazing thing he's done.  But he has also started something very good that I'm sure a lot of people would hate to see turn into another DEV C ... abandoned and fast becoming unuseable by not keeping up. 
 
Perhaps Pelle should consider taking on some helpers... perhaps someone to do IDE development or a couple of people to update Help files and such.  I can certainly see that it's a LOT of work for one person.  I would be more than happy to help out where I can (although my experience with Compilers is stricly user side, right now)...
 
Alternatively if Pelle wants to take this to a commercial product.  I'll be his first customer, so long as the price is reasonable... say $75.00 cdn...
 
I've got a substantial bit of code written in Pelles C, switching to something else --something less capable-- is not something I can easily do.