Hy all.
The forum has a surprisingly high rate of new members. Wee should bee glad. But please let’s do something about the bots. I’m not here to buy handbags or what else kinda nonsens. I want to talk and share about pencil2D.
Yeah. I know. It’s hard to fight against spammers…
I guess we have about 100 “real” members here on www.pencil2d.org.
I don’t know if you will believe it, but 16953 users already have been detected as “spammers” on this website (and so are blocked) by our antispam plugins.
A few others are not automatically detected and I have to delete them manually. It takes some time… The best thing you can do, when you see a spammer, is to go on their profiles and click “Report User”.
It will help me to sort regular members from bots !
G
Oh right!
Then i will!
And you are very welcome. Can’t wait to report these bots!
I’ll try very hard not to kick out annoying rookies… 
(please don’t shout.)
@admin
Not meaning to sound whiny (maybe a little passive-aggressive), but I have a hard time understanding how a spammer can still be hanging around several days after being reported. This forum is not busy by any measure, so visiting the site just a few minutes every couple of days should be more than sufficient to deal with them…but i see the same name(s) logged in a week after they’ve been flagged.
On another note, I am fully blown away that these spam activities are actually successful for the spammers. I can’t imagine what people exist who actually get beyond (or don’t have) the feeling that these spammers are nothing more than ignorant self-serving jerks, and then actually want to click the links. It’s head-asplode territory.
@mikshaw
I REALLY understand your frustration about spammers. And for me it is even more frustrating since I am part of the moderators, but with no luck since I am not able of banning them.
I am almost giving it up, but I know @gordie is lacking time in order to came here and do a cleaning thing, I mean he is working and do not have the free time to do that every two days.
As a moderator I am not able to delete any user account, not even able to edit any user account, and that is more frustrating to me since I came here all the time every day trying to help the Pencil community to have a cleaner look, spending time deleting spammers comments on the “spam” folder (which is a hidden folder), and trying to figure something out for having them away from here, but with no luck at all.
Just a little more few days for me around here before I move away for good if nothing is done to correct this.
Thank you for your support
Hi @mikshaw !
You are totally right.
Spam here is really a pain.
I have really not much time because of my work, and I have to say that yes, I can’t come here often (at all) to fix all this.
I see @kaiko has quit the website and it’s sad for us as he was really helping me with this…
The thing is : this website runs with Wordpress, Buddypress and bbPress, and it seems that the spam tools are not shared between all of them (which is kind of weird), so for example : when someone reports a spam message in the activity, I can ban the user but his message will remain in the forums, etc.
It really is a pain.
I guess one day or another (probably soon), tools will be improved to fight this.
If this interests you, I can give you a moderator role.
I did not understand why @kaiko wasn’t able to delete users… (well, we should not delete user but mark them as spammers)
G.
just made some cleanup.
\o/
Considering the (relatively) small amount of spam here so far, it’s not causing a serious problem yet, in my opinion. I just couldn’t understand how it could remain for such a long time. Also there’s the stuff in the wiki that i couldn’t understand. For one, i don’t even know how to access those posts without going to the spammer’s profile and following links there, and for two, it looks like the only way to remove wiki pages is to edit them to be empty (but still existing) pages. I might not fully understand how this wiki works, but that was how it looked to me.
If you give me the ability to do something about spam, even if that’s all i’m able to do, i’ll make good use of it. I’ll be here nearly daily as long as pencil2d is in development…it’s a really important tool. People on Windows might look at it as just another 2D animation program, but there are very few options on Linux, and none that have a good set of raster tools…except Dopey, but so far that (in my opinion) has a ridiculous way of animating…like Gimp’s layers-as-frames except even more confusing.
Anyway, i know i complain about Pencil’s instability, but as an artist and occasional animator using Linux i see it as a vital thing to continue improving and promoting it. If/when Pencil2D becomes a stable program–Linux stable, not Windows stable ;o) – with a few needed feature improvements, it could easily become one of the most desirable open source graphics programs.
I might not fully understand how this wiki works, but that was how it looked to me.
Yeah, before we had a plugin that was handling the whole wiki thing, but lots of spammers were using it to post stuff. So I disabled that system and now wiki pages are just regular wordpress pages that only editors can … edit.
Indeed, it needs some update coz’ there is no tree view anymore. I’ll fix this soon.
If you give me the ability to do something about spam, even if that’s all i’m able to do, i’ll make good use of it.
Ok, congratulations, you are now an editor (website) and moderator (forums) :) One thing to know : do NOT delete spam users (but i’m not sure you have that ability with your new roles). If deleted, they will resubscribe. What we need to do is MARK them as spammers so they just can’t send stuff anymore.
I see it as a vital thing to continue improving and promoting it.
Yes. Opensource is slow but necessary. I agree with you !
Thanks for all ! I’ll try to fix the wiki soon.
OK, I restored the index on the documentation pages.
Thank you, @admin
I have no current plan to actively hunt spammers, but i will mark them as soon as i see them.