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

[Jon]

Good work Tom. The captcha thing works well.

I agree with the RSS feeds proposal you suggested (im sure i fed back in
person, rather than on the list). Perhaps as a decision making thing we
could use the voting system we use for promoting features currently.
Does that seem viable from a tech point of view? It would be a system
people are currently used to, so that is an advantage.

Re: the server probs - we should probably change hosting. How is the
noflag.org.uk collective placed for hosting indymedia scotland? ;)

Solid.,

Jon


Tom wrote:
> 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).
>