The Great Purge of 2013, or, Why you might have been accidentally banned.

[zapkitty]

I’ve begun processing the reg list in order to thin out the remaining
counter-revolutionary infiltrators… er, I mean spammers.

First I went through the old “Pending” group and deleted all regs that
were older than 2 weeks.

Then I went into the “Banned” group and learned that 1) It was huge
and 2) this apparently because certain settings were sending some
new bad regs to the banned group rather than simply denying reg.

When I was done with the deleting the only 2 names left on the list
were 2 known people with actual bans on them… the ban group
thus shrinking by a few thousand regs.

As of now I’m carefully going through the “Members” group and as a
first step I’m running the group against the StopForumSpam database.
Any positives will temporarily be moved to the banned list for further
inspection and either restoration or deletion.

So I ask that members bear with us while we sort through this and
please contact us if there are any problems or errors.

Sincerely,
Comrade-citizen Zapkitty for the High Commissariat

[zapkitty]

Hmmm… apparently the question-and-answer captcha is leaking….
not nearly as badly as the default picture captcha it replaces but
leaking nonetheless…

Hi, Ignas! The members2 group is something you’re working with?

[Joeviocoe]

zapkitty wrote: Hmmm… apparently the question-and-answer captcha is leaking….
not nearly as badly as the default picture captcha it replaces but
leaking nonetheless…

Hi, Ignas! The members2 group is something you’re working with?

Leaking? Not again.

At least it isn’t arcing anymore.

[Breakable]

Hi Zap,
I think the members2 group is for the http://denseplasmafocus.org/ domain which should probably be destroyed as no-one is taking care of it.
Its ok if the leak is small as we have means for automatic cleanup.
I have a pre-purge backup (somewhere in dropbox).
Until now only one person has complained of loosing their account and he did not have it activated as it was an issue with a system back then,
so I think the purge is successful, but we can re-invite the users if we find a bulk mailing system to use.

Joe, please dont be cheeky, this is serious business 🙂

[dennisp]

Old articles seem better to me than broken links. I’d vote we keep denseplasmafocus.org up.

[zapkitty]

dennisp wrote: Old articles seem better to me
than broken links. I’d vote we keep denseplasmafocus.org up.

As I understand it the dpf org was supposed to be a meeting place for
dpf articles and talk. Rezwan started it before the siren song of
neutronic fusion led her astray 🙂

Reg-wise the dpf members have their own group but not many in it…
seems the forum mostly shared the FFS member group.

Don’t really know what members2 was about but it’s gone now.

And again, my apologies to anyone inconvenienced by the purge and
please let us know if something needs fixing.

… but the purge is far from complete, comrades! I estimate that 35-45%
of the remaining member regs are counter-revolutionary wreckers intent
on… er, I mean spam regs.

[zapkitty]

So I accidentally deleted the two members with genuine bans and we lost access to threads they’d been a part of.

I’m a bit ticked off that deleting a banned member such as sadovnik would wreck so many threads. That is not good forum design.

Their data can be reconstructed from forum db backups without having to roll back the entire forum but is it worth the while?

[dennisp]

How many threads are we talking about? What topics?

Definitely a horrible forum design.

[Breakable]

I don’t see much point in trying to recover the threads. Let leave history to the historians.

[zapkitty]

dennisp wrote: How many threads are we talking about? What topics?

Definitely a horrible forum design.

Unknown. It only came to my attention when I realized that a lot of topics
had gone flat-out missing in “Noise”

Replies to the banned are AWOL… neither deleted nor accessible and
throwing this error message:

The following errors were encountered
You are not authorized to perform this action

I’m just wondering how far the damage goes because if one of the banned
replied in a non-Noise thread then any replies chained off of that post,
even sensible, relevant ones, would be dereferenced as well.

[zapkitty]

Breakable wrote: I don’t see much point in trying to recover the threads. Let leave history to the historians.

Are we not historians, we who admin forums? 🙂

Per stats from major search engines no small amount of desired
information is traced back to forums.

[Francisl]

zapkitty wrote:

How many threads are we talking about? What topics?

Definitely a horrible forum design.

Unknown. It only came to my attention when I realized that a lot of topics
had gone flat-out missing in “Noise”

Replies to the banned are AWOL… neither deleted nor accessible and
throwing this error message:

The following errors were encountered
You are not authorized to perform this action

I’m just wondering how far the damage goes because if one of the banned
replied in a non-Noise thread then any replies chained off of that post,
even sensible, relevant ones, would be dereferenced as well.

Could you be missing necessary permissions?

[Author]

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