176 members and 529 guests right now

[Tin Can]

We are watched and read by many more than ever comment on anything.

Do we really want bully rules and kill this forum by bickering?

[Jac@stafford.net]

Those are encouraging numbers. When I am here I am aware that a lot more are reading than commenting, and I look forward to any wisdom the lurkers might offer, so welcome to all.

[Kevin Crisp]

I hope they all buy sheet film.

[Emmanuel BIGLER]

I'm a member of a local photo club and we rent a room to some municipal institution for our weekly meetings.
The room, for safety reasons, is regulated like any room open to the public, and cannot accommodate more than 40 people, and my understanding is that the owner would not accept any infringement on this.
So we have to strictly limit the number of members in the club.

Recently, our deputy-president announced us that we could admit 3-4 new members for next year, candidate members could be accepted only after recommendation by one member.

And I answered:
"New members only by recommendation! Great!
Exactly like the French Alpine Club in 1880; and no female members were allowed!"

(in Switzerland at the beginning, there were two separate Alpine Clubs, one for male and one for female)

[cdholden]

As someone who has been in the business of life safety for over 20 years, I applaud your building owner. Asking him to do otherwise would be asking him to ignore the well being of others. While it may be an inconvenience, building occupancy limits benefit the tenants whether they agree with it or not.

Chris

[Winger]

I'm a member of a local photo club and we rent a room to some municipal institution for our weekly meetings.
The room, for safety reasons, is regulated like any room open to the public, and cannot accommodate more than 40 people, and my understanding is that the owner would not accept any infringement on this.
So we have to strictly limit the number of members in the club.

Recently, our deputy-president announced us that we could admit 3-4 new members for next year, candidate members could be accepted only after recommendation by one member.

And I answered:
"New members only by recommendation! Great!
Exactly like the French Alpine Club in 1880; and no female members were allowed!"

(in Switzerland at the beginning, there were two separate Alpine Clubs, one for male and one for female)

The club I was in when I lived in MA met in a room with a limit of 60 or so. Membership was increasing and they had to decide whether to limit it or to find new (bigger) space. They opted for finding a larger room, which they did. They liked being open to everyone who wanted to join rather than becoming too exclusive.

Though I will also add that a large number of the "529 guests" are likely to be bots and/or people who want to post spam. I run a forum and that's about how it looks when you can see the IP addresses of those "guests". But, yes, a large number likely lurk and don't post and it's worth keeping that in mind.

[DG 3313]

+1

I hope they all buy sheet film.

[Sal Santamaura]

...Do we really want bully rules...What are "bully rules?"


...kill this forum by bickering?Randy, spend some time with the archive. Read what went on in the early years. That which you describe as "bickering" today is friendly banter compared to the bloodbaths which occurred back then.

This forum has survived much more than some relatively civil disagreements. It will continue to survive, especially well with the firm moderation of recent years.

[Tin Can]

What are "bully rules?"

Randy, spend some time with the archive. Read what went on in the early years. That which you describe as "bickering" today is friendly banter compared to the bloodbaths which occurred back then.

This forum has survived much more than some relatively civil disagreements. It will continue to survive, especially well with the firm moderation of recent years.

I have read them.

[Oren Grad]

Folks, it's fine to share for broader discussion any general thoughts you have about the culture of the forum and about moderation. Please avoid personal sniping and reacting to same. If there's a specific problem you need help with, let the moderators know via private communication.

Thanks.

[Taija71A]

Folks, it's fine to share for broader discussion any general thoughts you have about the culture of the forum and about moderation. Please avoid personal sniping and reacting to same. If there's a specific problem you need help with, let the moderators know via private communication.

Thanks.

Thank-you Oren for 'tidying up' this thread. Greatly appreciated!

[StoneNYC]

I'm in favor of making the forum "join only" and no guests, too many bots waiting for someone to post an email address, website link, phone number, etc and that gets instantly scooped up for malicious intent.

In particular I would love for all image sharing threads to be "members only" even with a 30 day wait to join just like the FS area.

That's just me.

[analoguey]

We are watched and read by many more than ever comment on anything.

Do we really want bully rules and kill this forum by bickering?
Bully rules - did something new emerge?

And it's good, no, great that there are more watching the forum, even if not always posting here.

Every active and good forum I have been on has /had that. That'd be how someone landing up here via a search engine will find it, also if someone has an rss feed, I guess.
It shows that the forum provides useful information!

[StoneNYC]

The only new rules I see are a positive change, more moderation that's cutting down on the negative stuff, it's getting to be a better forum!

[axs810]

I'm in favor of making the forum "join only" and no guests, too many bots waiting for someone to post an email address, website link, phone number, etc and that gets instantly scooped up for malicious intent.

In particular I would love for all image sharing threads to be "members only" even with a 30 day wait to join just like the FS area.

That's just me.

Good point about the bots!


+1 for turning this forum into a join only.

[Emmanuel BIGLER]

As posted on the home page http://www.largeformatphotography.info/forum/forum.php

"Most users ever online was 1,877, 2-Apr-2013 at 21:52."

And the forum survived ;)
Thanks to the moderators!

(I'm myself one of the moderators on http://www.galerie-photo.info, I know the problem of too many posts, too many members, and continuous attempts by spammers coming from all over the world to post anything)

[analoguey]

Good point about the bots!


+1 for turning this forum into a join only.
Nonsense.
Bots are such a non issue.
What a ridiculous premise to ask for closing the group up.
15yrs Post the creation of this forum, if people still don't know how to or when to share email, they'll learn by experience.

Better user experience would be for folks to have not the unlimited posts per day. Would help with the trigger fingers.
Would also help in reducing the stress on servers + bandwidth and backups. Some have trigger fingers and everyone else suffers the consequences ain't right.

[jnantz]

Nonsense.
Bots are such a non issue.
What a ridiculous premise to ask for closing the group up.
15yrs Post the creation of this forum, if people still don't know how to or when to share email, they'll learn by experience.

Better user experience would be for folks to have not the unlimited posts per day. Would help with the trigger fingers.
Would also help in reducing the stress on servers + bandwidth and backups. Some have trigger fingers and everyone else suffers the consequences ain't right.

couldn't agree more ...

but its more than 15 years ... greenspun's lusenet forum was started in the 1990s
it was open and this place was made from that forum.

http://www.largeformatphotography.info/credits.html

[fishbulb]

I'm in favor of making the forum "join only" and no guests, ...
In particular I would love for all image sharing threads to be "members only" even with a 30 day wait to join just like the FS area.

The challenge with closing off the forums from view by unregistered visitors (i.e. guests) is that if the forum becomes no longer public, very few people will discover it. Discovery of this forum is usually done by searches for LF information. If it's not public, it's not searchable, and over the long term, there will be far fewer new members joining than there are leaving (losing interest in LF, or aging into senility and having their computers taken away, or whatever). Over time, the forum activity will slow to a crawl, and other LF communities will start up elsewhere, because people will think that no community exists online, since it isn't searchable.



too many bots waiting for someone to post an email address, website link, phone number, etc and that gets instantly scooped up for malicious intent.


The sad situation of today's internet is that anything a person does on a computer is being broadcast to the entire world. At a minimum, it's being watched by a dozen national security organizations, much less all the hackers, spammers, bots, etc. Closing the forum off to registered users only just means that a bot needs to register to harvest that information - not a difficult task. In fact there are likely dozens of bots already registered and crawling the forums (but not posting, lest they be discovered) if my experience running other Vbulletin-based forums is anything to go by.

This forum doesn't even have an SSL certificate (allowing encrypted https:// connections). Anything we do here - what we read, what we write - can be seen by anyone, and easily, even if it's in a private message. It's like we are all writing postcards to each other and mailing them by making a billion copies and air-dropping them all over every major city in the world. For example, if I'm at work posting on this forum, my employer can read everything I post, and they know which account I am using to post, without even visiting the forum in a web browser.


The only new rules I see are a positive change, more moderation that's cutting down on the negative stuff, it's getting to be a better forum!

I agree completely.

I'd also like to see this forum get an SSL certificate so we can have https:// Certificates are about $15-20 per year.

[Oren Grad]

I'd also like to see this forum get an SSL certificate so we can have https:// Certificates are about $15-20 per year.

Thank you for this suggestion - we will ask our technical guru about it.

[Corran]

+1 to everything fishbulb and analoguey mentioned.

This is a font of information for those interested in LF - be them new or old members. In reality, the vast majority of folks do not write anything or even sign up.

I've never gotten a single bit of spam from my usage of this forum, either via email or via my blog. I have my cell phone number and email on my personal website and it causes no issues.

[StoneNYC]

The challenge with closing off the forums from view by unregistered visitors (i.e. guests) is that if the forum becomes no longer public, very few people will discover it. Discovery of this forum is usually done by searches for LF information. If it's not public, it's not searchable, and over the long term, there will be far fewer new members joining than there are leaving (losing interest in LF, or aging into senility and having their computers taken away, or whatever). Over time, the forum activity will slow to a crawl, and other LF communities will start up elsewhere, because people will think that no community exists online, since it isn't searchable.



The sad situation of today's internet is that anything a person does on a computer is being broadcast to the entire world. At a minimum, it's being watched by a dozen national security organizations, much less all the hackers, spammers, bots, etc. Closing the forum off to registered users only just means that a bot needs to register to harvest that information - not a difficult task. In fact there are likely dozens of bots already registered and crawling the forums (but not posting, lest they be discovered) if my experience running other Vbulletin-based forums is anything to go by.

This forum doesn't even have an SSL certificate (allowing encrypted https:// connections). Anything we do here - what we read, what we write - can be seen by anyone, and easily, even if it's in a private message. It's like we are all writing postcards to each other and mailing them by making a billion copies and air-dropping them all over every major city in the world. For example, if I'm at work posting on this forum, my employer can read everything I post, and they know which account I am using to post, without even visiting the forum in a web browser.



I agree completely.

I'd also like to see this forum get an SSL certificate so we can have https:// Certificates are about $15-20 per year.

Hmm good points.

With regards to registered bots, one forum when I joined made me do math to join, they asked a question simple like "what is the square root of sixty-four? And you had to answer in text and not numbers "eight".

There were only 3-4 of these type questions and even if you're not good at math you can use a calculator.

This to me seemed like one that made a lot of sense, why this isn't widely implemented already surprises me.

[Jac@stafford.net]

Posts made here show up in Google almost immediately, floated to the top. That is a good thing.

[Winger]

Hmm good points.

With regards to registered bots, one forum when I joined made me do math to join, they asked a question simple like "what is the square root of sixty-four? And you had to answer in text and not numbers "eight".

There were only 3-4 of these type questions and even if you're not good at math you can use a calculator.

This to me seemed like one that made a lot of sense, why this isn't widely implemented already surprises me.

I think that those are an add-on and not free with vBulletin. Which is true with most of the cool stuff.

[fishbulb]

Unfortunately, all forms of "captcha (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CAPTCHA)" - solving math problems, reading distorted words, whatever - can be defeated by bots, sometimes with very clever methods (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CAPTCHA#Circumvention).

One way to defeat any machine-unreadable captcha: Funnel the captcha question, as seen by the bot, to another website, where a human answers it, not knowing they are helping a bot.

For example, a pornography site that displays a captcha every few images or videos to supposedly "make sure you're not a bot". A real person, wanting to view the pornography, answers the captcha. The pornography site actually received the captcha question from one of its bots that encountered the captcha when registering for a forum that it wanted to spam. The bot sends the captcha question to the pornography site. The site automatically registers that there is a new captcha to answer in the captcha queue. The site displays the captcha to, say, five different visitors. The visitors answer the captcha. The site picks the mode from the answer pool, and sends it back to the bot. The bot enters the captcha and proceeds, spamming another forum with links to the pornography site, or to download malware that will infect more PCs and allow them to be remotely controlled and used as more bots.

That's not to say they shouldn't be used however. The most effective way to prevent forum spam is to have multiple layers of security. Several different captchas, both for registering, and for the first few posts of a new user. Multiple types of captchas too, often more than one type for things like registering for accounts. Another layer: automated content review - a program scans new content that is about to be posted to see if the structure of the content matches typical spam content. Mollom and Akismet are examples of this. Another layer: checking the email addresses, IP addresses, and user names against a database of those used by spammers, such as stopforumspam.com.

[Jac@stafford.net]

There seems to be a way to defeat all such methods, and some have become Open Source. Instead of becoming cynical I am grateful for our smart admin.

[Sal Santamaura]

Bots aren't the only problem. Spam here has come from places where humans are paid so little they're competitive with bots. There is no solution other than vigilant monitoring by us all, notifying moderators and having them deal with things.

[StoneNYC]

Unfortunately, all forms of "captcha (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CAPTCHA)" - solving math problems, reading distorted words, whatever - can be defeated by bots, sometimes with very clever methods (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CAPTCHA#Circumvention).

One way to defeat any machine-unreadable captcha: Funnel the captcha question, as seen by the bot, to another website, where a human answers it, not knowing they are helping a bot.

For example, a pornography site that displays a captcha every few images or videos to supposedly "make sure you're not a bot". A real person, wanting to view the pornography, answers the captcha. The pornography site actually received the captcha question from one of its bots that encountered the captcha when registering for a forum that it wanted to spam. The bot sends the captcha question to the pornography site. The site automatically registers that there is a new captcha to answer in the captcha queue. The site displays the captcha to, say, five different visitors. The visitors answer the captcha. The site picks the mode from the answer pool, and sends it back to the bot. The bot enters the captcha and proceeds, spamming another forum with links to the pornography site, or to download malware that will infect more PCs and allow them to be remotely controlled and used as more bots.

That's not to say they shouldn't be used however. The most effective way to prevent forum spam is to have multiple layers of security. Several different captchas, both for registering, and for the first few posts of a new user. Multiple types of captchas too, often more than one type for things like registering for accounts. Another layer: automated content review - a program scans new content that is about to be posted to see if the structure of the content matches typical spam content. Mollom and Akismet are examples of this. Another layer: checking the email addresses, IP addresses, and user names against a database of those used by spammers, such as stopforumspam.com.

WOW!! That's REALLY clever, never thought of that, it's horrible too, but clever. Sheesh!