Constant Content

I think one thing we could really use is the ability to write longer posts in the forum. After all, this site is populated by a bunch of more or less prolific writers, and it just seems silly to limit each post. I haven't been on any other forum with such a limit in recent memory, and seeing all these multi-part posts reminds me of old 1980s Bulletin Board Systems technology.

I loved the old BBS system. I never once went to the wrong one because each had to be connected to individually. As to your suggestion, I agree.

If there must be a limit in place, and I feel there should be, perhaps 1000 to 1500 words would be more appropiate.

That seems reasonable. There probably needs to be some form of limit to prevent abuse, but right now it is set quite low. While I tend to type short posts (at least on this forum), I have noticed that many people seem to run over, especially when they're trying to offer comprehensive and helpful advice.

Thanks for this input, I've increased the posting limits now, so posts can be up to 10000 characters long (used to be 2000) and you can repost after 10 seconds. Which hopefully will still mean that we're able to keep the board from being completely over run with spam bot posts.

If anyone is continuing to find annoyances using the forum, let me know and I'll see what I can do.

Thanks,
-jrichards

Hi Jeff,
As much as I was happy to see the delay time between posts in the forum shortened, I have noticed a dramatic increase in spam here since then. I think the spambots have figured out the delay. I must have deleted over 30 spam posts that were posted in between 10:00 PM and 11:00 PM this evening with most of them having been posted between 10:50 and 10:55 (or so). Normally, I'll log in and zap maybe two or three at a time, not this many. Can we keep an eye on it or adjust it back up? I hate spammers! Grrr. Any other ideas?

Celeste, thanks for your help! I had to do a big spam cleanup when the time limit was first decreased - so Jeff increased it a little more. He's trying to find a middle ground.

Ed

Hi Celeste,

Thanks for the feedback. As Ed. mentions I had increased the delay between posts to 15 seconds, but this is clearly not even close to enough. So I'll bump it up to 25 seconds and see if that has any significant effect. Thanks for letting me know.

jrichards

Thanks! I'll never complain about the "You are not allowed to post so soon" message ever again :)

Hi,

Since the length of the post CC allows is now much longer, there will be very few times when you want to post twice within a minute. Usually, that was happening when I had several points to make in one forum thread and ran out of room. I'd copy and paste half of the post into the second post and then have to wait until the forum allowed me to repost. However, now that the post length is longer, this will not have an impact. If it cuts out some of the incidents of spam, I'm all for a longer time limit between posts.

Hayley

I know this may sound crazy, but when I was a forum administrator I just checked the little box which required every new member to be verified. Sure it took me a while to add legitimate new members from time to time, but it kept the forums free of spam-bots.

I'm not sure how useful that would be to implement here, but an admin can add spam-bot email addresses to the "blocked" list when they notice them. Again, this may require too much work on top of the admin's already huge list of things to do so requiring all new members to be verified may be the way to go.