Please report spam!

[Joshua]

I see we've been invaded by a bunch of spam accounts, and they've started posting. Please contact Gabbo or myself if you see these so we can be rid of them post haste.

Your help is much appreciated!

- Joshua

[Gabe / Genjiro]

Thanks for taking care of those Josh, I was away for awhile.

[Thorvald]

Note: I originally had drafted this as a PM to Genjiro & Joshua but decided to send it to the forum instead in order to get more thoughts on the subject of participation and forum membership...

Genjiro & Joshua,

While they haven't spammed the forum yet, it seems fairly clear that most (if not all) of the last dozen members on this list are not Blue Feathers (or friends). Is there a way to screen membership? I'm not sure what kind of settings this forum has but in managing Yahoo lists I've simply required a message saying "Hi, I'm XXX and I'm interested in YYY" in order to join. Spammers won't do that.

I'm also trying to figure out a way to encourage more membership and participation on this forum. While I tend to lurk more than chat on lists (hence part of the problem not the solution), I'm a bit disappointed in the lack of activity here. (This is the least chatty group of gay men (and women) that I know of. ) I counted the introduction section and only 35 of the members have even said "Hi". Any thoughts on how to get people to open up? I would love to see this forum create the sense of community that Clan Blue Feather is all about.

As far as membership is concerned, something that I am looking at doing this weekend is creating a SCA Blue Feather group on Connexion. I would simply make it a portal/link to this Blue Feather Page and Forum not use it as a separate BF list/group. Hopefully this will get the rare SCA members who are on Connexion to join this group (and an even greater hope will be to get more mundane "Blue Feathers" to join the SCA ).

In Service,
Thorvald

[Joshua]

Thanks for your thoughts. Gabbo upped the anti-bot software so it's harder for spammers to create a new account, but it looks like something we as administrators are going to have to keep an eye on (I deleted another half dozen bogus accounts tonight).

As far as the forums go, keep in mind that up to this point the Clan's main point of information distribution was an e-mail list (which still exists), in addition to fragmented online communities (Facebook, MySpace, Yahoo Groups, etc.), and creating this is a whole new deal. In time this may become the main point of interaction, but since nothing about the Clan is "official" (as we're the epitome of an autonomous collective), we'll just have to wait and see what works best for everyone over time.

Anything you want to do to encourage participation would be fine, though.

- Joshua