......?
ETA: And all members with post counts of 1.
......?
ETA: And all members with post counts of 1.
everything in nature is sort of gross when you look at it too closely. what is an apple? basically the uterus of a tree - terrifel
They had it coming. Bastards.
This will do wonders for encouraging new posters here, I'm sure.
wtfwtfwtf CRiSPy WHYOriginally posted by chat
"There are no ordinary people. ... It is immortals whom we joke with, work with, marry, snub, and exploit." C.S. Lewis
I was asked by CRSP to purge the 0 count members and older 1 counts. This was done today. The names can be reused and people are most welcomed to re-register. I think, but I am not sure this will be done on a semi-regular basis going forward.
[modhat:wd6haff2]As tempers are already running hot, please feel free to flame away here but please keep in on topic.[/modhat:wd6haff2]
Let me add, flame me too as I agreed to this with only the most minor of protests.
What Exit? recommended me to break my posting cherry in this thread. I don't think I should really, after finding my account deleted due to ????
Look I have participated many times, had many good discussions and debates in chat over everything from Global Warming to cats. And to have my account deleted was a great insult, yes an insult. I actually thought I was banned or something and having done nothing wrong you can imagine my feelings.
Whoever decided this Minority Report style was out of line. I made it clear in chat I wasn't a big fan of posting but did enjoy chatting. Deleting me to solve some problem I was not a part of was not a nice thing to do.
ETA: If this is done again *after reading What Exits post* you can bet your god damn hat I will not jump through the hoops again to re-register.
What benefit is there to removing those accounts?
Lurkers become posters. Lurkers chat. Lurkers don't drag on anything, so why?
Science flies you to the moon; religion flies you into buildings.
One reason I can think of is that spammers will often register an account and leave it dormant with no posts for a long period of time, and then suddenly start using the account to post spam months or even years after they registered the account. Purging accounts with no, or only one post to their name is a quick way of dealing with the problem.Originally posted by Queen Tonya
Proud member of the '09 Phanters! K.I.L.L. S.M.U.R.F.S.
Have you ever wondered if your mom kissed you goodnight after giving your dad a blowjob? You are now. "To be second in space is to be second in everything," LBJ
Except it also sweeps out people who registered their Doper names and haven't done anything wrong.
Except spammers can be deleted when they start spamming quite easily, for that matter.
Just doesn't make a lot of sense.
Science flies you to the moon; religion flies you into buildings.
HAAAAAAAAAAAAAA HA HA HA HA HA HA!!!!
You fucking retards!! HA HA HA!
I swear CRSP has to be SBSO, it's the only way to explain the constant and unceasing fuckups you guys manage on a near daily basis.
I can only express in the strongest terms that I find this completely unacceptable, and am reconsidering posting here. If this is how a board that is already slowing down treats its members, then frankly that board deserves to stagnate and die.
Because you are squeamish about a few troll accounts, you just wiped out over 400 accounts, most of which were probably members of good standing. Chicken Toes, one of the most inoffensive people you can think of, was deleted. Why should anyone want to join this board? Do you want to whittle the member base down the the same 15 people? Because when you go out of your way to insult your user base, that is what will happen.
Monumentally stupid.
Why was this not discussed in the Hive?
everything in nature is sort of gross when you look at it too closely. what is an apple? basically the uterus of a tree - terrifel
This was wrong.
I've appreciated the openness this board was run with, this flies in the face of that.
I'm sure many of those accounts were safety nets if the Dope ever went down permanently.
"To give anything less than your best is to waste the Gift."
Steve Prefontaine
There is no reason I can discern for doing this. This was a very bad idea. Jim, you did this, quite apparently, because Crispy asked you to but with no idea what he was hoping to accomplish or gain by it. You are apparently unable to offer any explanation of why you did this. I feel pretty frickin' dumb right now, I was trying to calm people down by saying that, since there's no plausible reason TO do this, it obviously had to be an accident.Originally posted by What Exit?
We know of at least two regular chatters who were deleted (those being the only two who reregistered and protested thus far, it's possible some others just won't reregister) and it seems to me that people who are already participants in chat are probably the most likely pool of people to start posting in threads. Doing something purposeless just to alienate those people is stupid. Meanwhile there are plenty of people who wanted to register their usernames here to prevent spoofing, and there's no possible benefit to the community to screwing those people over and confusing the rest of us, even if they're not posters. And there are definitely people who read regularly (you can see them listed online) but don't post regularly; some of those people probably would potentially have become great users.
This does NOT make sense. This is not SOP anywhere else, and I don't understand why anyone would possibly have decided it made sense to do it here. I mean, if Crispy has decided to wash his hands of this place that's fine but just turn it off, don't do shit like this.
I'm sure someone's going to pop in to poison the well by (falsely) claiming that I just immediately protest everything the admins here do, so whoever wants to do that can get started.
They can be renewed.
I don't have much else to say.
I 101'd Bwittman3
Why would they want to?Originally posted by What Exit?
everything in nature is sort of gross when you look at it too closely. what is an apple? basically the uterus of a tree - terrifel
Good point Myrna, good point.Originally posted by Myrnalene
Well, sure. It's not that common to ruin your standing in one post or less. I first responded to this thread with a joke because it was so obvious to me that it was either an accident or an inoffensive cleanup, and that it would have near-zero impact. That someone would register an account on a message board in order to participate in chat but not post had not occurred to me. That a number of posters not touched by this would take so deep offense had not occurred to me either.Originally posted by Myrnalene
You ask why anyone would want to join this board. To post more than once, I hope.
How easy is it when you get 1,500+ spammers signed up in a single day? (I've seen it happen on other boards, even with anti-spammer measures in place.) Its a lot easier to simply run a script that purges every account with 1 or less posts than it is to wade through that mess.Originally posted by Queen Tonya
Proud member of the '09 Phanters! K.I.L.L. S.M.U.R.F.S.
Have you ever wondered if your mom kissed you goodnight after giving your dad a blowjob? You are now. "To be second in space is to be second in everything," LBJ
A lot of them won't, and if you're planning on deleting them again in a few weeks there's no reason why they would want to do so.Originally posted by Myrnalene
I just can't believe you thought you should do something like this without even figuring out why he asked you to, Jim, whether or not "he has final say". That makes no sense. I'm sorry, but even if you, for whatever strange reason, couldn't anticipate the reasons this would cause problems, couldn't you at least have stopped to think about whether there was any reason TO do it?
Well, I would hope so to, but everyone here had a post count of 0 at some point. And I would think most people are aware that some people lurk on message boards and end up posting for the first time a lot later. I've done that some places; silently making it appear to such users that they had been banned for no apparent reason is obviously counterproductive.Originally posted by Harlequin
Uh, so you delete people who JUST signed up? Lurkers? And all for no positive result, since spammers can reregister those accounts just as easily as they registered them the first time.Originally posted by Tuckerfan
Smartest group of people in the world here.
There are members only forums that (like the apparently useless Hive) that non-members can't access. There is nothing wrong with being a lurker. Lurkers turn into posters, lurkers tell their friends, and yes lurkers sometimes participate in chat. What's been done here is incredibly destructive to the attempts we have been making to get this board to thrive.Originally posted by Harlequin
Get back to me when you have something relevant to add about this board.Originally posted by Tuckerfan
everything in nature is sort of gross when you look at it too closely. what is an apple? basically the uterus of a tree - terrifel
Of course, but why would you register an account, and why would you mind losing an account you're not using? I lurked at the Dope for years without registering an account. What would be the point if I weren't going to use it?Originally posted by Excalibur
Look, I am sorry, I clearly did not think this through. It was not my suggestion but I also did not argue against it.
Techwise the purge only has a few options. It is lightweight. It does not work great.
phpBB is open source.
Thanks so much for your ongoing effort to rule the board and drive off people you don't like.Originally posted by Myrnalene
It ain't up to you to set the tone of this or any other conversation and insult and attempt to shut down people with differing opinions.
But of course, that's just SOP for you.
I reserve the right to be bothered by things that don't faze you,
and to cheerfully ignore things that bug the shit out of you.
I am not you.
You got something to say to me, say it in the Thunderdome and don't try to hijack this thread with your whining. I doubt you will though, you coward.Originally posted by Chimera
everything in nature is sort of gross when you look at it too closely. what is an apple? basically the uterus of a tree - terrifel
I said what I need to say. Please don't play the game of pretending to be too retarted to understand.
I reserve the right to be bothered by things that don't faze you,
and to cheerfully ignore things that bug the shit out of you.
I am not you.
Originally posted by ChimeraOriginally posted by Myrnalene
everything in nature is sort of gross when you look at it too closely. what is an apple? basically the uterus of a tree - terrifel
One might register an account so they can lurk and chat, or access the search function, or see board images, or not have to lurk with the default board settings, or access all the forums even if they don't have much to add, or probably a lot of things I haven't thought of. Kicking them out doesn't seem to be productive, though.Originally posted by Harlequin
Science flies you to the moon; religion flies you into buildings.
I've lurked places for years, with an account, and later started posting. I don't even understand why you'd ask that, are you claiming that you know that no participants or potential participants were affected? Because it seems most likely to me that at least some were.Originally posted by Harlequin
Look, repeated attempts to claim that users with zero or one posts don't count are not going to suddenly becoming convincing. It should be obvious that at least some potential posts were impacted here and to no benefit (at least none that has been identified so far.) Strained attempts to minimize the harm this action caused don't impress me, when no one seems to have identified any benefits from it.
Of course he won't. Childish, unreasoning sniping is his SOP. After all, if he did something other than sniping (really inappropriate for here, by the way), he'd have to actually back up what he said.Originally posted by Myrnalene
And on preview: yep, called it:
Originally posted by Chimera
You think you're going to stick around longer than five more minutes? 'Cause it looks to me like you're just itching to find an excuse to leave all pissed off. How many accounts were deleted? Do you have any idea? Was it 10, 20, 30, or more? How many of them were simply Dopers who'd "parked" their name? I don't know, and I don't care, really. This is just a message board, and no matter what's done, somebody's always going to be pissed off about it. Its not like you're paying to post here, after all.Originally posted by Myrnalene
Could this have been handled better? Sure. Was it necessary? I dunno, and I don't care. It does seem to me, however, that getting royally pissed off about it (And how long has this board been in existence? It ain't like anyone here's got a particularly long history of using the boards.), is someone who has a whole lotta nothing to do in their life.
Proud member of the '09 Phanters! K.I.L.L. S.M.U.R.F.S.
Have you ever wondered if your mom kissed you goodnight after giving your dad a blowjob? You are now. "To be second in space is to be second in everything," LBJ
Who exactly is hijacking this thread with their usual bullshit games?
Why don't you both take it to the pit? Or are you the whining cowards you like to accuse me of being?
I reserve the right to be bothered by things that don't faze you,
and to cheerfully ignore things that bug the shit out of you.
I am not you.
It was around 400 accounts.
"There are no ordinary people. ... It is immortals whom we joke with, work with, marry, snub, and exploit." C.S. Lewis
It was close to 500 member names of which over 400 had not looked at the board for over a month. That probably should have been the criteria if we did this at all.
I know that, early on, I had proposed doing just such a cleanup, about every couple of years, with that sort of criteria - not by post count, but "hasn't even looked at this board in over a year"Originally posted by What Exit?
Dunno what was to be gained by doing this now.
I reserve the right to be bothered by things that don't faze you,
and to cheerfully ignore things that bug the shit out of you.
I am not you.
Tuckerfan, just this morning I was talking about how much I loved this board. I'm not the type who needs excuses for anything. If I wanted to leave, I would already be gone. I really don't want to, and I hope CRSP can somehow make this right.
everything in nature is sort of gross when you look at it too closely. what is an apple? basically the uterus of a tree - terrifel
About 500 apparently. We have no way of knowing if they were people who were merely securing their name, people who were around just to chat, people who were lurking every morning over coffee, people who were waiting to attack the board in a massive campaign of gross out images, people who registered and then died, or what. But so? The point is that in this huge net, they did catch some people who registered on the board because, on some level, in some way, they wanted to be part of the Domebo community. And hey? Guess what? We do need the people who want to be members of the community. Even if they're "just" in chat. Or even if they "just" like to lurk about and read. There's no reason to indiscriminately dump them all. Especially since it takes about 5 seconds to re-register, and I don't see any reason why trolls and spammers won't do exactly that.Originally posted by Tuckerfan
Yeah, it is just a message board. And some of us (maybe stupidly) thought it was a pretty neat little community that we would like to nurture and help grow. Bending over backwards to let trolls dictate our policies and give them more attention isn't the way to do that.This is just a message board, and no matter what's done, somebody's always going to be pissed off about it. Its not like you're paying to post here, after all.
[
I'm still swimming in harmony. I'm still dreaming of flight. I'm still lost in the waves night after night...
Do you have an idea or an article you would like to see on the Electric Elephant? Email me at theelectricelephant(at)gmail.com!
It was a group delete. There is no reasonable way to go one by one.Myrnalene Jul08 22:30:51 Jim, did you delete them one by one or did you group them and then delete the group?
[modhat:iv5qjviq]Please take squabbles with each other not related to this mess to a new thread in the T'Dome. I asked up top to keep this to my fuck up. Enough bad blood for the day. I hope a mod comes on-line to referee this thread, I don't think I should.[/modhat:iv5qjviq]
Because I didn't know the answer and would like to, of course.Originally posted by Excalibur
No.are you claiming that you know that no participants or potential participants were affected?
When did I make even one such attempt, let alone repeat it?Look, repeated attempts to claim that users with zero or one posts don't count are not going to suddenly becoming convincing.
And how would he do that? I can tell you that there's probably no way to restore the deleted accounts. He can issue an apology, but that's not going to cut it with everyone.Originally posted by Myrnalene
Proud member of the '09 Phanters! K.I.L.L. S.M.U.R.F.S.
Have you ever wondered if your mom kissed you goodnight after giving your dad a blowjob? You are now. "To be second in space is to be second in everything," LBJ
This is true, all we can offer at this point is an apology. The deed itself is done. Some will not come back and I am sorry about it.Originally posted by Tuckerfan
To reserve a preferred username, use PMs, use chat, change board settings, subscribe to threads, etc. Or just because they plan to post but just don't quite get around to it right away. Even aside from specific benefits gained by registering it just seems likely that SOME people will have registered for awhile even if they haven't taken the plunge into posting quite yet.Originally posted by Harlequin
I think what I quoted was one attempt, anyway. I'm sorry, I shouldn't have implied that you REPEATEDLY did so, I was just sort of thinking about the couple other things others had said. I shouldn't have implied that you were some sort of advocate for this move, obviously you're not.Originally posted by Harlequin
Right. There is almost certainly no way to restore things, at least assuming it's all in a MySQL database which I think is what's usual for this kind of thing. But at least he can notice and agree not to do it again, and post an announcement so people who are confused will know they are free to reregister without fear of further deletions.Originally posted by Tuckerfan
Trolls will, spammers are unlikely to. Spammers use bots to sign up and register at various boards, then sell the rights to spam using their bot network to anyone who's willing to pay. Its an automated script that handles everything from the registration to the posting, if it finds it no longer has an account someplace, it doesn't bother to re-register, it just moves on. And believe me, board spammers are a huge problem on even small boards. I'm a mod at the Tucker Club's board, we have very low traffic, and literally only a handful of active posters, but we get hit by spammers all the time, even with every bot-blocking piece of software that's available for the boards (and we're using the same software as Domebo). The ones that show up and post their garbage immediately are the easiest ones to remove, so they're starting to fall out of favor, being replaced by the ones which register and wait before attacking.Originally posted by pepperlandgirl
Yeah, it is just a message board. And some of us (maybe stupidly) thought it was a pretty neat little community that we would like to nurture and help grow. Bending over backwards to let trolls dictate our policies and give them more attention isn't the way to do that.[quote:yggfueht] This is just a message board, and no matter what's done, somebody's always going to be pissed off about it. Its not like you're paying to post here, after all.
[/quote:yggfueht]I agree, but when you get tons of posters hyperventillating at you because of a troll, some times all you can think of is doing something quick to try and shut them up, so you can deal with all the other issues that arise. (And, Christ, some of the drama that people cook up is just unbelievable. I imagine that its a lot worse here than it is on the Tucker boards. At least there, we don't have to deal with people saying crap to someone about something that happened in a poster's personal life. I can't imagine what it must be like on a more "general" board like this, where people discuss a wide variety of things.)
Proud member of the '09 Phanters! K.I.L.L. S.M.U.R.F.S.
Have you ever wondered if your mom kissed you goodnight after giving your dad a blowjob? You are now. "To be second in space is to be second in everything," LBJ
Before anyone thinks more were deleted, I noticed a glitch in the membership, I re-synced the stats. I actually deleted 700 posters today. Only half of our membership ever posted more than once. Did I mention the tool was not working great?
You deleted half our membership.
Don't know what there is to say, really.
everything in nature is sort of gross when you look at it too closely. what is an apple? basically the uterus of a tree - terrifel
Well. This...was a surprise to come home to.
So now they are just dirt-covered English people in fur pelts with credit cards.
It never ceases to amaze me what some people consider a good idea.
Honestly, I don't see how you can rebuild trust after that.
Was that exactly what CRSP asked you to do? It would be nice to know who is responsible for this.
I'm not a prolific poster. I don't typically have a lot to say about things, although I am interested in a lot of different topics. I joined up at the dope maybe a year ago, but I've been reading there off and on for years. When this place and the giraffeboards opened, I took the opportunity to join a smaller community, maybe one with fewer cliques and in-jokes. Although I don't expect anyone to know who I am (I have less than 300 posts combined on the other boards), I thought it would be nice to keep my username consistent, so I registered it here even though I did not post at the time.
As it turned out, I enjoyed reading the conversations here, but did not really have a lot to add. Is that really a reason for me (and others like me) to be deleted? I understand that I have never posted, but I have been registered here for over 4 months. How does going through and deleting accounts, that although without posts, are certainly active accounts (I was on the boards reading less than 4 hours before my account was deleted) do any good? I understand there have been problems here with trolls, spammers, and the like, but how does my post-less account relate to that? How was this decision reached, and was there any type of consensus on it before action was taken?
Originally posted by Myrnalene
I am just seeing this now, and it's late so I won't say much, but I have to ask...why wasn't this discussed anywhere?
This wasn't even talked about via PM with the mods. This...I actually don't know what to say. I'm going to sleep on it, maybe I will have something coherent to say in the morning.
Yeah, I really don't like my first post being one bitching about the administration of any given place; I don't think I've ever done that before. But, congratulations, you've done it.
Monumentally dumb decision. I joined*, wanted to lurk awhile, I broke no rules - got kicked out for it. Way to make lurkers feel welcome.
*Which was a pain in the arse in and of itself, since I tried to join during the recent mod election - no message at any stage during registration process or the welcoming emails to say that there was a delay, nothing on the boards saying that that I could find. Sent an email to admin@domebo.net**, the address that sent me the welcome email, no response. I wonder how many people who tried to join in that time were put off by the complete lack of response?
**Had to use that one. Ever tried to find an email address on the board's front page to contact someone if you're not logged in?
Does this really need to be so goddamn dramatic? It was a rash move that they thought was going to have no impact to anyone. They were wrong. Allow them to say "oops" and decide a better way to do it next time. The world is not ending. Your trust was not violated. It's just a message board.
In my opinion, the right way to deal with this is: 1) agree that the criteria for deletion were a bit capricious and not well-thought-out, 2) apologize to those who had their accounts deleted and ask them to sign up again if they would be so kind as to not hold a grudge, and 3) come up with better criteria for deleting "dead" accounts or possibly don't do it at all (the only benefit I can see is freeing up usernames; the burden of an inactive account is basically nil).
Note: armchair database admins can pontificate about how easy it is to restore from the SQL backup all they want, but unless you're talking about literally going back in time and losing all the posts that have been made since the backup, you're proposing something you don't understand. Yes, it's very easy to get the 700 missing rows from the "users" table, but no, it's not at all likely that just restoring those 700 rows into the database is going to do what you expect, and there's actually a reasonable chance that it will fuck everything up royally. A smart admin does not bypass the application layer and fiddle directly with the DB in major ways unless 1) they have a full understanding of the app code and DB schema or 2) they are doing a full restore.
Aside from that, the only safe way to do it would be to take the board offline for a while and do a lot of testing. This is not something I have time for right now, and I get the impression I'm the only board techie well-versed enough in MySQL to do it (apologies to any of the other nerds if I'm wrong about this). Given the tiny amount of data that was lost and the fact that we're not preventing any one of these people from just signing up again, I don't think it's worth it.
ETA: I was curious how many chatters got nuked. Here is the list, along with how many messages each had. I think it's safe to say ChickenToes and MultiTalent were the only real active chatters affected by this:
Code:+-------------------+-----------------+ | username | count | +-------------------+-----------------+ | MultiTalent | 451 | | Chicken Toes | 276 | | CraZgurlie | 59 | | Chris Hansen | 38 | | Una Persson | 28 | | Unsquare Dance | 18 | | Nunavut Boy | 17 | | bitchslap | 9 | | SexyExy | 9 | | me3po | 7 | | 1UP | 6 | | Toadfoot | 6 | | Mymalene | 5 | | nonny | 4 | | green | 3 | | Lorna Mae | 2 | | Not Giraffe | 2 | | Socky McSockerton | 2 | | Greathouse | 1 | | Superorganism | 1 | +-------------------+-----------------+
Anyone sticking up for the rights of people who can't find one topic in 4 mths that they find worthy of their contributing to, can go and take a flying fuck at a flaming doughnut. How can these people be said to be invested in this board in any significant way? Are the rest of us supposed to be proud that they have deigned to add their names to our roster, or something?
It's a good job this ain't my board or I'd be deleting some of the accounts in this thread too, just for shits and giggles!
In fact, if some of you care so much, why don't you set up a "Lurkingboard" and see how much fun that is?
To sleep, perchance to experience amygdalocortical activation and prefrontal deactivation.