2012-04-19 - Re: [GRASE-Hotspot] Progress on Forum

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From: Tim White <ti***8@gmail.com>
Message Hash: 276ae249343fa4dc1a2e5f01ea2d2d75a11dee08318bb8bce5e826ec4ae873fe
Message ID: <4F907346.9010802@gmail.com>
Reply To: <201204190329.59872.solbu@solbu.net>
UTC Datetime: 2012-04-19 13:19:18 UTC
Raw Date: Fri, 20 Apr 2012 06:19:18 +1000

Raw message 

On 19/04/12 11:29, Johnny Solbu wrote:
> On Thursday 19 April 2012 00:17, Tim White wrote:
>> I'm investigating Phorum as our new Forum,
>> and currently working on mailing list integration.
> If you enable sending messages to the mailinglist from the forum, I will be leaving the list all together. This will also mean I'm leaving the project, since the list is the main communication channel, as far as I understand.
> The reason beeing, you cannot find a workable solution for stopping spam on forums.
>
> As someone who's been running several mailman lists, one of which have aproximately 700 members, and a few forums, I know what I'm talking about.
> There are companies in Asia, and possibly Africa, who's business model is manually register on forums, clicking the "I confirm" link in email, and then publish a variyng amount of spam posts on forums, on behalf of clients who purchase advertisements.
> There exist no (re)captcha method that solves this problem.
>
> I have no problem with a forum, I have problem with integrating a forum into a mailinglist.

Johnny, I totally understand your concern.
I've run many mailing lists, and no forums in my time, and personally 
hate forums. When I first started the Hotspot project, I used a Wiki to 
try and encourage community to assist. That was spammed to pieces.

I will at some point be enabling forum->mailing list support, however, 
it will be done progressively and carefully. (I hate spam myself). The 
reason for setting up the forums like this, is in recognition that a lot 
of people "newer" to the web than us older web users, are very 
uncomfortable with mailing lists, and find it a hurdle to use, however 
thanks to the links of facebook and other web based applications, they 
are very comfortable with web apps, and forums fit their mindset.

Most likely, the way I'll initially setup the forums, is a support 
forum, and a mailing list forum. The mailing list forum will just get 
emails from the mailing list, and the support forum will ideally send a 
single email to the mailing list when a new support topic is opened. 
User registrations will be "recaptched" and with also be "moderated" 
until X good posts are approved. (Similar to how the XDA forums don't 
allow new users to post in developer forums until they have posted X 
good posts in "newbie" forums). This helps ensure that all new users are 
moderated until they have posted useful things (which I can assure you, 
companies in Asia/Africa won't waste their time doing) related to the 
Grase Hotspot.

If this is working well, I'll then look at integrating the mailing list 
as a 2 way, however, initially it will be moderated so every email from 
the forum to the mailing list with sit in a moderation queue until approved.

The last thing I want, is more spam. If at any point the forums are 
being spammed in a way that simple moderation can't control (i.e. 
everyday I'm rejecting spam posts) then I'll can the forums quicker than 
you can pop down to the shop and buy some milk.

I hope you won't leave the list because of my decision, and I hope you 
can see the reason for my decision. There are a good number of users in 
our community who would like the forum interface, but ultimately the 
method I prefer is mailing list, and that's the method that will stay if 
spam becomes an issue.

I welcome your assistance with running both mailing list and forum, and 
spam filtering, as I know that I still have much to learn about them. 
(One of the few reasons the list is on sourceforge, is they seem to keep 
spam out fairly well atm)

Thank you for speaking up about your feelings too, so far I've only 
heard people wanting forums, it's good to know I'm not alone in wanting 
a mailing list!

Tim
p.s. Nginx seems to have managed the Phorum/mailman integration without 
spam issues, so surely we can too!

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