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I have received complaints about the quality of some of the threads and messages posted to the forum these days.
If I see a thread that is out of control, I can and do mark it as Read-Only. This effectively shuts down the thread. However, I just don't see a majority of the rogue threads.
So, my question is, should we try to inhibit the noise and improve the quality of the responses in some way? For example,
Let me know your thoughts and feelings on this.
Jon
Jon it appears to be students from a particular university that are causing this problem right now. An IP range ban may be the appropriate answer to the problem as well as an email to the university in regard's to the posting. You do log IP address's from which people post from I assume? It should be possible to get enough information to put a stop to it via first banning the IP range associated with that university from forum access then finding the proper email address of the authorities there.
Although I don't like that type of thing, I believe the behavior is not only out of hand it's also possibly a breech of the university's rules and regulations. Either way it's making it difficult for people who have legitimate questions to even FIND there own questions let alone the answer to them.
I myself don't mind most of the humor (life is too short to be taken seriously) and when it gets a bit crazy it's never been without provocation. However the recent group of posts appear to be from people who have yet to have a moral compass (or know what one is for that matter) as well as have very little background in being civil. Much if not all of the verbal words used with them is of there own doing (or undoing as it may be).
The bottom line it appears to be people from a specific university (thus associated IP's) behaving badly. Just my thought.
Stephen
Stephen, good idea - certainly contacting the institution in question might help. but unfortunately people can still use effective countermeasures - proxy browsers to gain anonymity, anonymous browser etc. thumbs up for the initiative, though.
Actually I have some experience with administrating forums. There are numerous things you can do. IP bans are a last resort usually however all things considered it's students who are behaving badly (they give themselves away by there poor use of language and generally crude methods), and judging just how little effort they are putting into doing there school work means that proxies etc won't be a big problem (since they didn't put much effort into very important work).
For registration if it is enforced captcha is needed (IE those twisted password images) this will deter bots (there are numerous spam bots that spam forums like this out there). I think really the big problem is just one university at the moment. If I see a few annoyance posts that doesn't bother me (thick skin from being an admin of a forum I guess). It's when it's when a consistent flagrant abuse of things occurs my ire is raised.
I suppose registration is going to have to happen, I hope they choose software that is less prone to the spam bots (VERY annoying as they can posts 100's of useless posts in a few minutes).
Hopefully the schools administration will straighten the kids out. If not there school won't have access to Keil's website (woops) or forums for anything. That's an appropriate consequence for lack of discipline.