About 12 hours ago, a few hundred posts relating to announcements of old releases of digiKam and darktable were added as posts. I would describe this as “spam”.
I doubt that many people are interested in these old announcements. If they are interested, I expect the announcements are available on websites. Cluttering up the forum with this stuff detracts from the usefulness and attraction of the forum, for me.
Perhaps this spam was unintentional, and won’t happen again. Or perhaps we can expect spam relating to many other products.
This appears to happen once in a blue moon. The difference this time appears to be the scale. While it is annoying to regulars like you and I, I could see it as a no-go for casual users and visitors. Imagine a new member posing a question and then boom no one finds the post to welcome them. But then again, this does not happen often…
… or even newly added because we have old posts in the RSS feed that hadn’t been scraped yet.
Perhaps a condition could be added, something like “don’t scrape entries in the RSS feed that are more than a week old.” Or “don’t scrape more than ten entries from any one feed per day.”
Anyhow, this techie stuff is beyond my knowledge. And I am grateful to the good folk who take care of this forum. I hope it doesn’t happen again. Or at least, not often.
You can take this as a confirmation that people are continually working behind the scenes to try and improve things, even if those things aren’t always visible to you. Except this time we tried to make things better, and we did, but there were also some side effects. We aren’t always 100% successful (who is?) but we are constantly working to keep things running.
By “constantly” I mean that @darix, our super dedicated sysadmin, works on something for the community pretty much every single day. He’s been doing this for over 8 years. That is why things, while not perfect, are running extremely smooth.
Indeed this was an attempt to switch to a better method of pulling in posts from the various websites we manage and include commenting on. The noise does suck, but it really is once in a blue moon at best. Sorry for that.
Besides, everyone here is so darn active that the spam posts get pushed down low on the list pretty quickly. Man you nerds like to talk!
