Sencha why the lack of direction?

[SeaSharp2]

After the buzz of the conference the good ship Sencha seems to be adrift.

• sencha.com has suffered persistent performance problem since mid December.
• The blog comment system takes random exception to worthy user comments.
• The forum is routinely raided by spammers.
• But what worries me the most is the stale road maps and lack of posts from the solid old-time technical staff who are the backbone of this company.

So come on Sencha tis the season of aspirational executive mission statements and also please sort out this sick web site.

[mitchellsimoens]

• The forum is routinely raided by spammers.

To reply to this one point that I am qualified to answer is that I feel the complaint. I don't like waking up and banning 20 users for 5 pages of spam... this takes quite a bit of time to do especially on the weekends when I don't have to work but I do to keep up with the spam (along with other forum posts). Last couple months spam has exploded.

Here is what we are doing about. There are modifications to vBulletin that we can use that take advantage of IP databases like Akismet. The issue here was that several people were off during the holiday season and it will take time to test the modifications before actual implementation, we don't want to break the forums or be too stiff on who we let register so it's finding a balance that is right. vBulletin doesn't have a built-in spam protection, wish it did. On Monday I blocked around 700 IPs from accessing these forums and initial impressions are great past couple of days. We will see how it goes during the weekends when spammers are out in force. The downside to this is what happens when a real and valid user gets one of these IPs? Edge case but it could happen and once the modifications are implemented, I will remove these IPs.

So we aren't just sitting around and letting spammers just have fun. Now that people are back from holiday vacations, we can continue with evaluating these modifications.

[mschwartz]

I think I delete at least 20 spam posts from the site daily, as well.

Oddly, the vBulletin forum I run gets spam, but nowhere near this much.

Banning IPs is fun. Like, you can ban all of China! But seriously, it's not the way to go.

We use the Human Verification Manager, set to "Question & Answer Verification" and I've added several questions to it. Questions like "what is six plus three."

[mitchellsimoens]

Don't want to ban IPs but it's a band-aid for now. We had the questions before we switched to reCAPTCHA but that wasn't working just as much as reCAPTCHA isn't working.

[skirtle]

What are the objections to first-post moderation? I know that's something several other forums do. Sure it means people might have to wait a few hours for their first post to appear but surely it'd kill spam dead? It's still a burden on the moderators but the rest of the community won't have to suffer as much.

[mschwartz]

Why do people spam?

Because Google gives really high page ranks to sites/pages that are linked to by "quality" sites like this one.

There are four basic things you can do about people wanting links back to other sites for the purpose of page rank:

1) Use whatever vBulletin plugins (see vBulletin.org) that make sense.
2) Have enough moderators to immediately remove spam when it shows up.
3) In the admincp settings, make sure rel="nofollow" links are enabled.
4) On the registration page, warn new members that the links are nofollow and it's pointless to spam.

Re #1, there may be some that forbit posting links unless the user has 'n' posts. Spam can be sent by PM, by posting on groups pages, on member pages, and so on. Look at plugins for all sorts of spam opportunities.

Re #2, it's work, but it seems people are willing to do the job.

[mitchellsimoens]

What are the objections to first-post moderation? I know that's something several other forums do. Sure it means people might have to wait a few hours for their first post to appear but surely it'd kill spam dead? It's still a burden on the moderators but the rest of the community won't have to suffer as much.

From one problem to another for moderators. Instead of banning 10% of users you have to approve 90% of users and disapprove 10%.

[mystix]

While we're discussing dealing with spammers
-- could you make it really easy to delete spam posts + automatically ban the buggers?

Right now, it takes me about 7 clicks to nuke a spammer.
It's too much work imnsho, which is why i dropped off the moderation radar a few years ago.

[mitchellsimoens]

While we're discussing dealing with spammers
-- could you make it really easy to delete spam posts + automatically ban the buggers?

Right now, it takes me about 7 clicks to nuke a spammer.
It's too much work imnsho, which is why i dropped off the moderation radar a few years ago.

Will absolutely look into it!

[mmullany]

Sea, we had two downtimes in December, but we hope we've been pretty good apart from that. The blog comment system gets an enormous amount of spam, and it manages to capture almost all of it, but does capture a few comments that aren't actually spam (just look like it to the engine). The forum...well Mitchell captured that. On the roadmaps, we're busy trying to ship what we showed you at SenchaCON :-) We're in the middle of the final push to get Designer 2 and Touch 2 into beta and as far as 4.1 goes, we're busy getting it from beta to release.