176 members and 529 guests right now

[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.