[imc-scotland-discussion] Spam and server problems, site improvements

[Tom]

Hello people,

Firstly, I didn't get much feedback on the idea of taking articles from
RSS feeds of local community media like burgh angel. The technical side
of this is all done and ready to go but we need a decision-making
process for choosing RSS feeds. Personally, I don't want a bunch of
political opinion blogs being fed into Indymedia Scotland -- I think we
should take only grass-roots reporting type stuff. News.

If there is no discussion on this then I will put up a poll on the site
because we need to deal with our democratic deficit.

Secondly, more than 2000 spam events were posted to the site in the last
week. I have deleted them and installed a stronger spam 'captcha' test
for article and event submission. It is called 'recaptcha', and is
actually a pretty cool project. It presents to the user words from
scanned books and newspapers and correct submissions are put together to
digitize these out of copyright texts -- so every time people have to
fill in these silly spam tests they are helping to build a digital
archive of human knowledge. Very good.

Finally, the server is currently very heavily loaded and the site barely
accessible. This comes up from time to time and is probably related to
greece being a powder keg at the moment. (We are hosted on a greek server).

-- 
Tom