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Old 4th June 2011
Conformal Conformal is offline
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Default forum history, bsdforums and spammers

hey all,

not sure what the history of this site is but i recall posting on a forum at bsdforums.org back in the day. wtf happened to that site? it appears that it was gobbled by this one. only thread i could find was

thread 710 (apparently i cannot post urls...)

based on that it appeared to have gone down sometime in 2008. this makes me feel old. for a minute i thought this was a continuation of that forum but it appears it was a competitor.

based on the thread referenced above i am to understand it got swamped by spammers. when i registered for this forum i noticed the controls on new accounts were pretty serious. am i right to say that captchas etc are insufficient to stop these spammers nowadays?

in general i'd be interested to hear a bit about the history of this forum.

cheers
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Old 4th June 2011
ocicat ocicat is offline
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Conformal View Post
not sure what the history of this site is but i recall posting on a forum at bsdforums.org back in the day. wtf happened to that site?
There are a number of threads in the archives which discuss BSDForums.org. One being the following:

http://www.daemonforums.org/showthre...ight=bsdforums

In short, the owner of the site hadn't visited the site for its last two years of existence, & he had not given full rights to the appointed Administrators there authority to ban spammers. All that could be done is move spam to a section unseen by the public. The amount & frequency of the spam grew to the point where the Administrators couldn't deal with it fast enough, so the regulars decided to start a new site. DaemonForums is the result.

Several months after DaemonForums started, BSDForums was taken down. Finding legitimate threads amidst the spam was becoming impossible.
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Old 4th June 2011
BSDfan666 BSDfan666 is offline
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I'd say this site is a forced continuation of BSDforums, the owner was a slacker and wouldn't keep it updated.. deal with the spam, or give anyone else access to the server.

Many of us loved BSDforums, but the site was failing into disrepair and something had to be done.

BSDforums is dead, long live s/BSDforums/daemonforums.
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Old 4th June 2011
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Carpetsmoker Carpetsmoker is offline
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Quote:
I'd say this site is a forced continuation of BSDforums, the owner was a slacker and wouldn't keep it updated.. deal with the spam, or give anyone else access to the server.
I wouldn't say exactly that, over the years I've seen many people at volunteer positions do the same thing, they lose interest, or time, or it simply isn't as fun as it used to be, but they don't know when to go ...

But yeah, it certainly is a "forced continuation". I would much rather have continued at bsdforums.org. We tried to approach the Administrator of bsdforums.org, but he was uncooperative.
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Old 5th June 2011
Conformal Conformal is offline
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interesting info guys, thanks for filling in the blanks. i stopped using bsdforums before the spam problem came up.

i find it surprising that the owner of bsdforums did not understand the utility of having someone else having full admin access. i have seen that behavior too many times in the past amongst business people: a total unwillingness to let others have real control over a process. reminds me of a job i had where my boss made me run *every* purchase by him because he was too stupid and short-sighted to give me a budget for purchases. "oh, you want to buy a USD 300 computer to replace a broken one... yeah, i guess that's ok" and this was the president of the company.

have you guys tried using spam blocking add-ons for the forum? we have our own spam problems with our fluxbb support forum, i'd be interested to hear any success stories in that area. seems that doing stuff manually and having a lot of rules, e.g. cannot post URLs until you've made 5 posts, is the current MO.
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