Welcome!
This is the community forum for my apps Pythonista and Editorial.
For individual support questions, you can also send an email. If you have a very short question or just want to say hello — I'm @olemoritz on Twitter.
Spam on the forums
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@omz, if you do some work here, I think a great addition would be a signature for our posts. For example, I could put my device, iOS version, pythonista version etc in my signature. Can avoid a lot of confusion and give some clarity when looking at people's posts/responses.
One more step would be a rating of our python programming ability/understanding of Pythonista. So not to put any additional work on you, could be a honor system. We select between say 4 or 5 categories of proficiency with python combined with pythonista.
I enjoy writing here, and like to share and give help if at all possible, but I want people to know I am a beginner. So even I am trying to help, maybe I am not the best help they can get and possibly I maybe flat out wrong! I have no ego about this, and from what I have seen, this forum is not in the least bit ego driven. That's very nice!Yes, your proficiency statement could also be a part of your text signature, but I think this item deserves its own field. In the future as Pythonista goes viral, I think this will be a welcomed piece of data you have collected.
Also, I cannot believe any new user would have a problem with the qualification process. I log into here often on my Mac, I haven't saved my login yet on my Mac, So I see the 'login in' to reply message. But I can see the whole forum. Just can't reply without logging in. Is not the same if you can't see anything. Is still very open and welcoming in my mind
My 2 cents of feedback :)
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I think @Phuket2's ideas would be great in the long run, but aren't really necessary in the short term. @omz please do consider them sometime in the future. :)
An account approval system sounds like it would work out well, at least in theory. But how can @omz know whether an account is going to post spam or not if they haven't posted anything yet and don't have a track record? If there's a way to predict that, I'm all for such a system. I'm just curious about the practicality aspect. Not to demote the idea or anything, though.
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@omz when you say "hidden" do you mean new forum users can post as soon as they sign up but only they can see their posts until you make their accounts public? Do you think people will just start spamming once they're approved? Just trying to help work out the hypothetical kinks in such a system. :)
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New users can post right away but their posts are only visible to others after they are approved by the administration.
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Yes, that's the idea. Of course it's possible that someone who's been posting useful things in the past suddenly decides to take up a career in the spam business, but I think that's quite unlikely. Another possibility would be that spammers post something generic like "Thanks!", "Great post!" etc. to get approved, and then start spamming later, but I think that should be easy to detect, and I could just unlock such a "harmless" post without changing the "trust level" for the account...
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@omz that makes sense. I know this won't affect any of us who are already here, but just out of curiosity, how often do you think you would be able to sort things out with this moderation system? You did say that you check the forums about once a day, but would this take a while every day? I guess it would depend on how often a new user signs up. I think this information would be helpful for new users should this system be put in place so they know what to expect.
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@omz Is the system in place yet? Another load of spam just came in.
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Another idea: Let your users mark spam, and remove recent messages from the user who sent the spam until the moderator determines what should happen. This should enable a rapid response.
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Is the system in place yet? Another load of spam just came in.
I haven't deployed the change yet, though the code is mostly done.
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@omz Great!
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Is it just me, or are the spam floods coming more often than before? We just received a new one about 15 minutes ago. :(
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I'll try to deploy the change a little later today. There might be some downtime.
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Okay, the new moderation requirement should be up and running now.
New accounts are now "untrusted" by default, and their posts won't show up publicly. All existing accounts are already "trusted", so it's theoretically possible that there are "sleeper" spammers, but I don't think that will be a big problem (most previous spam was from new accounts).
I've also taken the opportunity to make the font a little more readable.
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@omz I like the new font, but you might want to change the weight - you can't really tell which post titles are bolded.
Also, having the ability to delete posts would be useful in the future :)
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def make_more_readable(html): return u"<b>" + html + u"</b>"No offense, but that was my first impression. The font itself is nice, but it really looks like all text is in bold.
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I agree with @techteej and @dgelessus, but we may just be splitting hairs, I don't know. Anyway, I'm glad you were able to implement the changes, thanks. Also, I like that you increased the number of posts on the homepage from six to eight (including both apps). :)
