There’s a some things I wanted to be sure I addressed.
First, is the “troll” situation. It seems there are some misunderstandings so I am going to clear them up.
As most you of you know, there’s been one or a few people making things less than ideal here at times. This is unfortunate, but online as in life, some people can act like jerks and make things harder than they need be. Especially in a forum designed for people to get support and encouragement, I wish this wasn’t the case, but as long as we have a social community of real people, some of those people will be ones we wish would go away or that cause problems at times. This is how it goes here, on Facebook, at work, in prison...everywhere people gather and interact.
Sometimes people say things we don’t agree with or like. Just because someone doesn’t feel the same way that you or me or a mod does, is NOT a reason they should be banned. We can disagree here on the forums, and if an opinion is different than ours we can voice ours as well in a way that is respectful of other members. This is very different than abusive or intentionally disrespectful behavior, which is what I’ll address next.
This brings us to the situation we have been experiencing and to one degree or another will always experience, which is members who are not adding to the community in a positive way and are intentionally and repeatedly making the forums less encouraging and supportive.
When we come across these members, we have several options. A mod can private message them and make them aware that their behavior is a cause for concern before escalating the action taken.
If that either isn’t effective in curbing the behavior or isn’t appropriate due to the nature of the behavior, we can ban the user. Let me explain detail what that means and why it isn’t always as permanent s we’d like...
The forum software we use is called vBulletin and is the industry leading software for forums, it’s not free, obsolete, or clunky software, it’s a $300 license which is pretty expensive by forum software standards. I only point this out to make everyone aware that we’re not trying to get by on the cheap or without the best tools available. The primary reason we use the most expensive forum software is because they offer the highest level of spam management and security and we recognize the importance of that.
What the software allows us to do is ban users when it is necessary. When we ban a user, it disallows them from logging in again, and disallows them from registering again with that same email address and / username.
So what is to stop a user from getting a new email address and registering again? Nothing, which brings us to the next topic, IP addresses.
An IP address is a set of numbers that basically represents your location online. The forum software allows us to see every users IP address and if necessary, also ban that IP address. If we do this, even getting a new email address won’t allow the user to login or register again because the IP address itself is banned.
So problem solved, right? Not always...
Since the IP address represents a persons location, all the person needs to do is change locations or make the forum software THINK they have changed locations.
The first one is obvious. If they were at home using the forums, they can access it from school, work, Starbucks, McDonalds, a neighbor’s wi-fi connection, etc. All of these varying access points will have different IP addresses which of course will not be banned and it will appear to be a brand new user.
The second is by the use or proxy servers. A proxy server is basically a computer you log into and access before you go online, so to the outside world, it is not YOU accessing the web, but the proxy server. So when this occurs, we are no longer seeing the actual IP address but the IP of the proxy server.
Relatively easily, from my location in the US, I can log into a proxy server that is 100 miles away, or even on another continent. For testing purposes, I have software on my computer to access proxy servers, and within 30 seconds I can log into a different server with a different IP address in virtually any major city worldwide. There are literally hundreds of thousands of proxy servers available and more being released every day.
Is it possible for us to disallow access from ALL proxy servers? Sort of. Most, but not all of the time depending how advanced the proxy is, we can tell that a request is coming from a proxy. So why don’t we just disallow them completely? Two reasons...
First, it will slow down the forums for everyone. Every time a page loads, the forum will need to check to ensure the request is not from a proxy. However, this I would be willing to live with.
The second and more important issue, is that there are very legitimate reasons to use a proxy server and we have no way of knowing which is legit and which is actually a previously banned user. For instance, almost all corporations and schools use a proxy server, as well as most shared public wifi networks. If a user is accessing the forum from their dorm room at college or at work, we see them as coming from “University of Chicago” or “ABC Corp” or whatever. If we block all proxies we block all that legitimate traffic too.
At this point, I’m very reluctant to shut down access to the forums from any proxy for this reason, it would block access for a large number of people who may not even know they’re using a proxy.
As you all can see, we recently changed the look of the forum a bit. This wasn’t because we have extra time on our hands and money burning a hole in our pockets, or because we are avoiding the issue outlined above.
The forum software periodically releases major updates to their software, just like any other software does. People that create spam bots, hackers, and other people we want to protect ourselves against come up with ways to circumvent the software protection measures over time, just like they do with anything else. To guard against this, the software builds in new and additional protection measures to keep us as secure as possible and releases new versions of the software with these changes.
Spambots and hack attacks can shut the entire forum down or do unfixable damage, so it is very important we not only try to address the previous issue, but this as well, so we needed to upgrade our forum software when necessary. Our previous brown “wrapper” was not compatible with the new software version, so we needed to have a new one created. This is the only reason for the change. It’s not because we were tired of brown or wanted to blow some extra money on graphic designers and programmers, it’s because it was required to keep the forums protected with a software upgrade.
So currently, the mods are spending a great deal of their time trying to keep things as under control as possible, as best they can. I for one greatly appreciate their effort considering this is a voluntary on their part. I admit I get defensive when I read posts that seem to be criticizing that the mods are not doing enough or not doing the right things from people that are as happy as clams to use the forums for their benefit but unwilling to put forth any effort to even educate themselves about the issues we face as a community and come up with a positive suggestion as to what could be done better. The mods are not professional forum programmers or technology experts either, but we are all doing what we can to figure out what can be done and what the limitations are. I would ask that everyone keep in mind the hours of work being spent trying to make things better for everyone before criticizing the effort with no better solution to offer. I would further invite you to consider publicly thanking the mods for all they do to try and provide a great community. Being politely critical is fine, but it is your responsibility to first devote the time and energy understand what you’re criticizing rather than simply taking advantage of the benefits others time and hard work provides you.
So where do we go from here?
There are a few options, none great, but I’m happy to listen to feedback to help in our decision.
First, we can do nothing and ignore crummy people like we need to do in other areas of our life. I’d prefer this to not be our only course of action.
Second, we can try to block all proxies and accept that any users behind legitimate proxies will also be blocked and will need to find another way to access the forums if they need to.
Third, I can make the forum a paid forum. I expect malicious users would be unwilling to pay to access the forums to act foolish, even if it was relatively inexpensive like $10 a year. This would solve a lot of problems very quickly and has advantages, but is something I really don’t want to do. As the mods will attest to, it’s not something I’ve ever even brought up before, but it is a possible solution.
Fourth, we can require all posts to be moderated and approved before they are viewable on the site. This is a huge amount of work and makes for a terrible forum experience. I would be very hard to convince me this is the right direction since it would not only make the community a bad overall experience, but I could never ask mods to do that amount of work for free, so it would need to be in conjunction with option #3 so I could compensate them.
Fifth, someone else can tell us another solution we don’t know about. There are certainly smarter people than me, and I don’t claim to have all the answers, so I if there is a solution that works considering all I’ve discussed above, I’d love to know about it so it can be considered. If there isn’t, then one of the options above will be the path forward. I’m hoping someone can offer up something we haven’t thought of.
This is a community, and like any community or social activity, there are positive and negative aspects of participating that ebb and flow over time. I personally think this is a great, tight-knit, and overall very supportive community with wonderful members and very dedicated moderators. If someone is reading this and thinks this isn’t a good community or that the negative aspects outweigh the positive, participation is not mandatory and effects no one but you, so you may and should leave. If however you feel like I do and that the community is an overall a positive experience, I would ask that you do your best to keep it that way and either do what you can to make it better or at the vey least, stay neutral and not take it in an unhelpful negative direction so those of us willing to make the effort to nurture it can do so without barriers from within.
Thanks for reading, I’ll look forward to some new ideas and suggesstions!