The End of Qt3 As We Know It?

Tom, have you considered handing off vetting duties to someone else? I think a lot of us would feel a lot more comfortable if you did that. It’s not that I’m against new faces–even a lot of 'em–it’s just that this is one of the last remaining refuges on the Internet from the low-forehead crowd, and you’re (shiver) surrendering to them.

Never, I say! We have not yet begun to fight! Don’t give up the ship! A bird in the hand is worth two…wait, um…give us liberty or give us death! Yeah, that’s it! Don’t fire 'til you see the whites of their eyes, boys!

I don’t blame Tom at all for doing this (although I demand a full refund), but I don’t think spammers are the big concern.

I’m more concerned about a flood of meme-spouting postwhores who predominate every other gaming forum. They only make up a small portion of qt3 right now, but when every thread is a stream of “I’d hit it” and lolcats, it’s going to be a little sad.

At which point, the gates will be slammed shut again. This is my main concern as well, mal. If the signal to noise ratio plummets, then this experiment will be shuttered and filed under the same category as that time I switched off polls.

-Tom

This is mainly going to be a problem when we get Digged or Slashdotted. A short delay between registration and posting privileges (even as little as 48 hours) would probably take care of this.

And this is what we get…

http://www.quartertothree.com/game-talk/showthread.php?t=37566

I’d close the gates hard and fast.

Another option to consider, an invite system:
http://www.vbulletin.org/forum/showthread.php?t=101801

Haven’t tried it, but it looks like a popular vbulletin mod. Basically, current posters get invites to bring in other people.

I know I’m still a total newbie - though I lurked here for a while before joining - but I’ve been hanging around on the internet talking about games since i got on usenet in '90 (c.s.i.p.g.* FTW), and this is the last place I know of where the conversation doesn’t suck. So, since i got posting privledges here, I haven’t bothered to visit many of the other forums I used to go to, with the exception of slashdot (+3 posts only, please.)

I hope the level of discourse stays at about the same level is has for the last 2 years - I really appreciate the insight that a lot of members bring to the discussion.

I wander around the Internet fairly often during the slow periods at work, and I look at gaming sites like 1up and IGN, insideresque blogs like Kotaku, and a fair amount of similar things over on the sports side of things like Sports Illustrated’s blog-filled section, With Leather, and the stories in the Kansas City Star. All of these places link to comments openly, inviting you to look at them. All of these places allow just anyone to comment. It is painful and terrifying to watch the rampant fanboyism, idiot fights, and silly namecalling.

At least here that’s all done with some layer of creativity.

I’m for the vetting process. It took me about three, four months to get in the front door as Tom was way behind, but I didn’t mind, and it helped me not make an idiot of myself. I think handing off the vetting process to a few of the regulars would be a great way of handling it if those people are willing; I don’t want to see QT3 become the IGN boards, because I come here to read and feel superior to the people on the IGN boards.

Are there enough mods for Qt3 to manage the spam or will it be as much or more work for Tom to patrol the boards instead of vet newbies? Perhaps some captcha plug-in in the registration to at least try to keep the bots out?

I think the concern is, “If you didn’t have time to vet people, where will you find time to monitor the forums and toss out the undesirables?”

Found this on vbulletin’s forums:
[i]On my forum I attract a disproportionate number of idiots, so I have been using a waiting period for several years now. This system is already built into vbulletin by the “promotions” feature in the usergroups part of the admin control panel. I set all new members to a special usergroup that has no privileges until 24 hours have passed. Once the waiting period is up they automatically get promoted. I also require unique emails and email activation, which wastes the troublemaker’s time. I then moderate (my staff does rather) all newbie posts until they get a few.

-snip-

In the control panel settings, “User Registration Options” I checked the “moderate new members” box to force all new registrations to the “(COPPA) users awaiting moderation” group (ID 4 I believe). Then I set the promotions system to upgrade them to a custom usergroup after 24 hours. I didn’t have to change the default settings, I just automate the mod approval of new members. Doing this automatically is a big reason why I switched to vb from ubb 3 years ago.[/i]

EDIT: although I think the invite system idea I posted above is a better one.

Is this the proper thread to discuss my beef with certain Valve properties?

There must be. A quick google didn’t give any answers, but it turned up a lot of VB forums with mandatory waiting periods.

Well, there are ways to auto-filter out a lot of spambots and such, at least the ones using automatic registration routines. We went through a bunch of mods for phpbb at OO until I finally found something I could alter a little bit. SpamBot registration has gone down quite a bit. I doubt that any of the auto-registering bots are getting through now.

Of course now that I’ve said that, the bots will have adjusted and we’ll get 100 new users in the next 24 hours.

How is a waiting period different from just letting people in?

Wow, OO’s evil overlord posts on Qt3? Have you and Tom ever had a dancefight?

I’m assuming a large enough wait period would cause people to wander off and forget about the place, unless they really wanted to participate.

I’ve used the invite system on a couple of phpbb installs. Works great. You can even put a generic invite code on the signup page and most of the bots are too stupid to discover it.

Doh! Stoopid bots.

I don’t know about this system specifically, but I’ve seen boards with a setup where you can’t include a URL in your post until you’ve made X number of posts. This may help defeat spambots.

I’m nervous that this new approach means we will drown in spambots. Once they get started, there’s no end to it…and they’ve gotten good enough that they make these posts with text that seems real, and it takes you a while to figure out what’s going on, which wastes even more of your time.