[greenlight]

so are we back in action?

[Chris Lawrence]

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...

[_slavo_]

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.

[!@#$%!]

Originally Posted by Chris Lawrence

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...

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.

[scwxx77]

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

[Chris Lawrence]

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??

[musicplatypus]

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

[!@#$%!]

Originally Posted by Chris Lawrence

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...

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...)

[greenlight]

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.

[musicplatypus]

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?

[Rob Instigator]

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).

[Dr. Eugene Felikson]

Originally Posted by !@#$%!

discord is overrated

 

[Thin_icE]

Originally Posted by _slavo_

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.

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

[The Soup Nazi]

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.

[Skuj]

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

[_tunic_]

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

[_tunic_]

one

[_tunic_]

two

[_tunic_]

three