Honkin On Bobo
1231 posts
Aug 07, 2014
11:36 AM
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So here's what I want to know. Since we have to enter that miserable F***ing code (90% of which get rejected the first time) in order to prevent spam from invading the forum. Why then, do we have to have a SECOND screen, by way of short messages getting automatically deleted. What's up with that?
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JustFuya
381 posts
Aug 07, 2014
11:47 AM
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Someone mentioned adding a CRLF to short messages. IOW, hitting 'ENTER' once or twice after your one-liner is supposed to do the trick.
Hypersensitive filter with one rule too many.
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Honkin On Bobo
1233 posts
Aug 07, 2014
11:55 AM
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thanks JF
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nacoran
7906 posts
Aug 07, 2014
2:47 PM
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Unfortunately we can't turn it off (we've asked the host company- it's baked into their software).
For the record it gets a handful of false positives every day and it's only ever actually caught real spam a couple of times. Lots of sites turn the captchas off after someone has a certain number of posts, but it's not an option. Most people don't run into the most draconian security measure. The hosts block certain IP addresses entirely. Adam himself got blocked once, Boris (and basically all of Russia and China), Tom, and several others have been blocked and it's a pain to get unblocked, although they finally have created a little app that collects the data they need to unblock you which means we can probably get you unblocked in a few days. :( We also, of course, hand approve all the applications to catch the obvious spammers, which means you don't usually get to post for 24-48 hours after you register. (That one we actually do have an option on, but it has been the most effective.)
To be fair though, before these measures a spammer could post a couple hundred posts before we could delete them and we used to have to delete each post one at a time. They have upgraded it so we can delete more than one at a time. It used to take a couple hours to clean up after each attack. It's still a pain to delete a member though because the membership list is listed alphabetical across a whole bunch of pages but the pages aren't marked by letter, so you have to guess about where that letter would fall,... if the server is laggy it can take 5 minutes just to find the name of the member to delete.
Like JustFuya said, there are little tricks that help keep yourself out of the spam filter. Try not to make posts with with a bunch of links with no text, or short posts that say something cliche like 'great job' followed by a link.
The depressing thing about the whole war on spam is that if more sites deleted spam immediately there would be less incentive for spammers to spam. It is what it is though. :(
(If the filter does get you, I undelete everything once a day. Unfortunately there are some rare glitches that cause posts to not show that don't have anything to do with the spam filter so it's probably worth trying at least one more time. I'll restore all the posts. You can delete the duplicates yourself.)
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Nate
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garry
525 posts
Aug 08, 2014
6:57 PM
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I have this problem sometimes, but far more often a different one. I enter my text, then enter the correct captcha. I click post, and that browser window (or tag), hangs forever, never completing. This happens about 85-90% of the time on a first try. So what I do now is enter my message, select the whole thing and do a "copy", then submit it. If it hangs, as it usually does, I copy/paste the URL of the window into another tab, paste my saved text into the form there, and submit. That one usually works, even while the first tab is still hung.
It's a pain in the neck, but gets the job done.
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nacoran
7916 posts
Aug 08, 2014
7:37 PM
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Garry, that's probably because the captcha has timed out. If the page has been open for more than 15 minutes the captcha 'resets' without showing a new captcha. It's another frustrating glitch.
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Nate
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JustFuya
388 posts
Aug 08, 2014
8:07 PM
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I usually compose in a text editor like notepad and refresh the thread before I copy & paste. Can't lose.
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STME58
1025 posts
Aug 08, 2014
9:08 PM
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Most of the time when I have had the message box open too long and the code has expired, I don't lose my message, I just have to type in the current code.
When I do loose the message I can usually recover it with the back button on the browser.
If the message I want to send is long I use a separate editor or copy before summit as has been suggested above.
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Rhartt1234
138 posts
Aug 09, 2014
7:43 AM
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I don't know squat about this kind of stuff, but the the interface at The Gear Page is about as easy as it gets for sharing pictures, videos without the pesky code.
http://www.thegearpage.net/board/
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