so are we back in action?

Seems like it, sort of...I have access to my website again too!

Realistically - if this ship goes down, what would be a good 21st century yet still reasonably "old school" replacement? I'd pay for another forum or whatever if enough people were interested...

I can't help but feel somewhere there's a discord bubbling over with active Sonic Youth discussion and knowing I'll never understand how to participate. Goodbye 20th century indeed...

There's a Reddit Sonic Youth message board existing too. However there's not too much activity going on there, and it's just general, I guess.

discord is overrated and doesn't work the same anyway.

but contemporary + old school: https://www.phpbb.com/ (why pay?)

however... i think this one is our software? https://www.vbulletin.com/

we have just never updated it or performed maintenance though... stuff like purging spammers would be a start. there are **many** orders of magnitude more zero-post "members" with trash marketing links in their profiles than real active users.

alt.music.sonic-youth still exists :D. Where it all began for me.

what's interesting is that all the SPAMMERS are back - dozens of filthy threads that you'll hopefully never see - I even just deleted a post from this very thread - weird cuz the spambot action had definitely chilled out before the forum broke...

alt.music.sonic-youth is still around??

I was going to suggest phpbb — very much like this board.

yeah, you gotta change the incentive structure and then nuke the accounts.

the economic calculation of spammers can be broken down into costs and benefits.

first, increase the cost of registration by adding captchas against bots, and registration questionnaires to filter out human bulshitters. if they wanna post garbage, make them sweat for it. have them write an essay or something.

then mods can approve honest registrations manually, rather than swat the swarm of flies endlessly after the maggots have hatched lol.

then remove some of the rewards. eg eliminate profile & weblinks that survive post banning. this can be done in forum settings. notice how spammer profiles all are blooming with contact info? eg this fresh dillhole: http://www.sonicyouth.com/gossip/member.php?u=143947 registered just today. has web porno address, email, skype links, various messengers you can click on. even if banned from posting, those links remain. rewards for them! pain for the rest of us.

also there are ways to reduce crawlers. see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robots_exclusion_standard.

you could also set it up so that new registrations can't post right away, so, no benefit possible (or increased cost of reward, like having to befriend us for a month before putting ads for some trash college paper mill)

all of this can be done in software to reduce the human labor requirements, but it requires an updated version of the software plus some basic tech support... i mean if you're using a vendor like vbulletin they should be able to provide guidance on how to set up things correctly for minimal effort, how to clean up dead profiles, how to block spammy addresses, etc.

there are only a handful of people posting every day, there is no reason for dozens of daily registrations and thousands of "invisible users" who are nothing but bots.

once you've curbed spammer registrations, and hurt their profits, nuke existing spammer profiles from the database.

do we really have 143,947 users? must be some party lolololol. don't serve them drinks anymore-- nukem instead.

eta, 2/24: "Most online action ever was 5,338 users, 06.14.2021 at 11:24 PM."
that was probably 5336 bots and 2 actual persons

and speaking of bots, this one just logged on: http://www.sonicyouth.com/gossip/member.php?u=137216 (banned, but still functional with a fully linked user profile...)

I loved https://www.saucerlike.com/index-2.html before official SY existed, somehow it is still up there, which is so cool to see.

I've been accused of being a bot before.

One being Facebook closing my account due to "suspicious or potential bot activity." I was never able to to recover anything or resolve it.


So, what was the problem with this board? Do we need a Data Hoarder to download the entirety of this board so we do not lose precious information?

Sonic Life

the movies thread got jammed up again and i had to delete an old thread to unlock it (probably a good thing, i couldn't even remember that movie from long ago lol).

Let's not jump ship to a closed alternative that could lock us out at any moment.

I'm the one who started this thread back when the board was, well, utterly fucked. That's not the case anymore, so let's stay here. :)

If this thing really is unfucked now, then I'm back, he said, to the glee of thousands.

this thread will be fucked up as soon as we post four more messages to it, give or take one or two ..... :rolleyes:

one

two

three

four

hmmm still not broken ???

What do you think triggers the breakage? A second page?

yes indeed. It would not create the next page when the current page reached it's maximum posts (which is 20). The way to recover would be to add another post and then delete an older post, something like that. But apparently it didn't break. It must be Sunday :-)

OR, it's fixed forever and we can stay here until the zombie apocaypse!

I am so happy it is working again. One more month to go to finish UNI and I will def. spend more time on here.

hard to believe people still post here

you guys are legends trapped in time

I just got a private message from a spambot, so I guess that's a thing now?

Can "bot" (in this meaning/context) be used as a verb? If so, who the fuck would bot this place anyway? Who the bot!

i keep reading this and laughing at the situation and trying to post something but i don't know what :D

testt

ok i figured out what to say finally

1. i'm really sorry you mods have to deal with this endless and now brazen shit.

2. were you able to update to the latest software version? because as i posted before, it's still being made... https://www.vbulletin.com/

3. and if nothing can actually be done except suffer... laughter still relieves pain :D

I don't know about the other mods but I know zero about the hosting/maintenance of this forum. I don't communicate with anybody about it, we were literally just given moderator status to deal with the crazy amounts of spam that started to appear about a decade ago. When the board goes thru its various mood swings I'm on the same unloaded page as you. I've poked around a bit to find various backdoors in the forum (some people have asked to have their accounts deleted entirely) but I don't think I'm supposed to be tinkering with anything so I don't. :)

damn, that sounds like a very unpleasant task to be performing manually in this day and age. i hope you're at least getting compensated in 200 gram vinyl or something.

the updated software has tools to assist your labor in those salt mines. various security and other admin functions are outlined in the vendor's pages, and i'm sure customer service would be able to help non-technical admins. but the powers that be would have to fork out $15 a month or whatever to runs things off their cloud (easier that running one's own server these days).

anyway, to you and moshe and stu and everyone else performing these chores under the current conditions: you have my thanks, and also my sympathies. but damn...