...more recent posts
Having some trouble with comments. Working on it...
Site went down for a few minutes just now. Not sure why. Investigating. No real damage is apparent.
We're having some issue with false new comment notices. My guess is that this is related to spam removal. Tom, did you remove a spam recently from Photo of the hexagonal "atmospheric" structure on Saturn and Showing new media work in the gallery threads? Just trying to get to the bottom of this. Sorry.
Page owners now have a tool to help them delete huge spam runs. Go to /spamdelete and follow the instructions there. It's basically like a 'find and delete' script, so the key to it being effective is to pick out a word or phrase you can search all your comments on that will return *just* the spam comments. In practice this isn't very hard because the spams will often contain a weird URL that is similar over all of them (like 289jwa89423w232.spamhost.com) or it will use the bbcode '[url]' link code that we don't use on this site.
Please let me know if you have any trouble using it.
Page owners can now close comments on selected posts. To do so, go to the comment page in question and click the [close comments] link found after the repeat of the initial post. If a comment thread is closed it will still display any previous comments, but it won't show the comment textarea box. To turn it back on: go to the comment thread and click the [open comments] link now found where the [close comments] link was before.
Some old threads are spam magnets. This should take care of that issue.
I am going to try to make some adjustments to deal with the sluggishness of the site. I think I will purge all user accounts of people who haven't visited in over 4 months (keeping, by hand, a few that I recognize.) Hopefully everyone will agree with my thought that this isn't a big deal. If someone wants there account back they just have to sign in with their old name again.
Here goes...
I started copying this site to the new server. You don't necessarily have to be aware. But if you were going to upload anything (images I guess) and it didn't matter to you whether you did it now or waited, then you should wait. If you do upload something after I crawl through your directory (but before we switch to the new server) we'll just have to figure it out and copy it over in a second step. So maybe comment here if you do upload stuff this weekend (I don't mean posts, just images.) Not sure yet but maybe I will try to make the switch live for Monday morning.
I did some work on the /log system today. You can now have finer grained control over how far back logs are kept. Unfortunately I nuked the entire referrer log table in the process, so everyone's /log has been reset as of about an hour ago. Sorry about that.
I changed the code slightly for the textarea boxes on all the /post pages. This is in response to long continuous strings of text (usually URLs) not wrapping for Dave in Firefox on Windows.
Did that solve it for you Dave?
Did that fuck it up for anyone else?
Well I had a little fuck up. I erased a bunch of new comment indicators in the database. Everybody with a user id over 50 has had all new comments marked as read in the database. These are the only people with elevated powers and a user id over 50 (not just 'remember me' signed in people):
joester
sally mckay
Kristin
selma
crystal
L.M.
So those people definitely lost any indication of new comments. Sorry about that. If you had some very old ones they might still show up but they'd have to be pretty old (over a month.)
To be clear, the comments haven't been erased. Just the red new comment markers on the front page.
Probably a lot of the other accounts over 50 don't actually read the site or use the new comments, but there are probably some at least on Sally's page. I'll write you an email Sally if you don't see this. Sorry.