HOW Lounge Removed

[moderator1]

Amp-

What you are saying about how easy it is to control spammers on these types of boards is what several HOWies have already pointed out many, many, many times. And each time Sarah and others at HOW have run that information to the parent company F&W.

There have been four moderators since 2006. Currently, there are five. The issue is not that the mods don't care, or that the mods left or neglected the forum. Or that Sarah doesn't care. The issue is that this forum is not on F&W's list of priorities.

Because of F&W compliance issues, moderators had limited powers. When this latest redesign happened, it took a few months before the mods who had been mods for years were given their mod powers back. With this iteration, the mod powers were less than what mods had in previous versions of the forum. F&W has always been hesitant to grant wider permissions to moderators to help them combat spammers. We are not employees of the company, so they may not have protocol in place to handle our roles. It is not my purpose here to debate how short-sighted this is on F&W's part.I'm simply sharing what we volunteer mods have been contending with a good long while.

When the forum was updated to this current software, lots of HOWies hated the design (it was a forum for professional designers after all) and had log-in issues. Another major issue was the advertising became a major annoyance. There were pop-ups every time you navigated from one page to another. There was advertising for design crowdsourcing sites which some considered a personal affront. Some of the advertising was set in the background so that it kept the pages from working well on mobile devices. Because of the poor design these issues and annoyances and F&W's unwillingness to listen to the users, folks began to migrate over to the FB group.

In addition to the migration,we mods simply could not keep up with the robo-spammers. The inability to combat robo-spammers made the situation worse, as HOWies would come back to check out the forum once in a while only to find HOW Town overrun with spam.

At first mods only had permission to clean out one spam message at a time. Each time we'd clean out one spam message, 200 more would show up. We could ban a user. If we banned a user, we had to delete that user's posts individually. Banning a user did not delete all of their data. We also did not have the power to ban IP addresses because the Mod view did not display IP addresses. So the spammers would simply create several user ids. When one was banned, they'd create more.

Eventually, as in the last 4 months, we were given broader permissions, but not enough where we were able to keep up with the bots.
The most that F&W has done as far as using the available spam-fighting tools, as far as we can see, is to turn on Captcha. Obviously, they have not used additional tools like you and MANY others before you have mentioned to stop spammers. We have no clue why this is because any of us who have dealt with forums know those tools exist. Their answer has been to amputate the offending part (the Lounge) instead of doctoring it with the needed medicine. In doing so, they've lost what was a vibrant community which was good draw to their website and publication.

There are many HOWies who miss having a forum and are using FB because it's too much hassle to come here. There are several HOWies currently considering starting unofficial HOWie forums.

[phoenix]

Thanks for the explanation and I empathise with the frustration you must feel as a volunteer mod.

I had only just mentioned, over on FB, that I'd done a lot of click/report on posts/users about a fortnight ago... and those users and those messages still exist, so I really do think HOW-F&W should just nuke the WHOLE forum and forget it. If they can't fix log in problems and enable others to fix the spam problems what's the point.

It just feels like this is some back-street alley filling up with graffiti, where as it used to be a little haven to share a coffee and seek advice. Everytime I return there's more rubbish, more needles in the corner and it's just sad.

Is there anything any of us can do?

[Ampersand]

Yes Mod1, thank you very much for the in-depth explanation. What you wrote clears up a lot of the mystery behind the current state of the forum. Forums need an admin who's in charge and very involved. The admin must have the authority and ability to make decisions, make software and coding updates, and most important, back up the moderators and provide the environment in which they can function.

From my experience (and at the risk of covering previously covered material), keeping spammers away involves aggressively implementing several methods.

First and foremost is a zero-tolerance policy for any advertising that violates the forum rules. Forums that are lax on this and allow spam posts to hang around for days or, even hours, become a magnet for other spammers who know their efforts won't be wasted. This, of course, requires that the moderators have the ability to instantly delete spam accounts and block IP addresses.

Next are registration countermeasures, like CAPTCHAs, hidden fields, honey pot traps, required questions that only prospective forum members will likely know, etc. The most sophisticated bots, however, submit their registrations directly to the processing scripts — bypassing the forms and superficial countermeasures. The programmers of these bots have also analyzed the most widely used countermeasures and figured out ways around them. What's quite effective in this regard is customizing the registration routine in a way that's unique to the forum and that spam bots won't recognize since it's a one-of-a-kind deviation from the norm. This might involve renaming script files or changing directory structures or tweaking php scripts.

In addition, broad geo-based IP blocking at the server level via .htaccess can help. There are various companies that keep track of IP addresses used by spammers and as these lists are updated, all IP addresses on the lists are blocked from not only posting or registering — they're blocked as soon as they hit the server and never even see the website. It's possible to even block entire blocks of IPs for different countries.

It's also possible to require that the first few posts from every new forum member be personally approved by a moderator (which also pretty much kills the human-entered spam). It's possible to instantly block posters who use certain spammy keywords. It's actually possible to do a whole lot of different things with the net result being a huge, giant decrease or elimination of spam.

Of course all the things I've listed above require an admin who has the ability, authority and desire to actually do these things.

As for the login problems here, yeah, I've run into them as well. I obviously don't have access to the backend code, but my best guess is that it's a badly implemented database bridge. When I design/develop websites and forums forums for client companies, I always recommend against trying database bridges — they're subject to creating login problems.

Anyway, it's too bad that the people who fix these things are blocked by the overcautiousness bureaucracy and disinterest of the parent company. Unfortunately, fixing that problem would require an order from the top levels of F+W Media, and if they don't care, well, the current condition of this forum is pretty much what's to be expected, I guess. It's too bad.

There are several HOWies currently considering starting unofficial HOWie forums.

It's very difficult to start a successful forum without an anchor that constantly feeds traffic to the forum. The situation here is perfect since there's a leading design industry magazine and website as the traffic magnet. There could be a fantastic community here for us designers. Unfortunately, F+W Media seems to be needlessly squandering that opportunity.

Even so, starting a new forum is easy enough to do, and at the risk of being accused of spamming myself, there's the small design forum that I've started up. The link's in my signature line. It has no anchor, like HOW, feeding it traffic, so it will likely remain small, but it's run by an actual graphic designer who cares about it (me).

[Halftone Dot]

Ampersand,
The "anchor" for this group is that a huge portion of this group has formed personal relationships over the years. I've been around since 1998, before the days of HOW having a forum, when there was Sparklist or listserv. A large core group known as HOWies have grown past the place where we need a magazine or other entity to anchor us. It's unlike any other forum/online group I've experienced.

We just need to have trust in where we land. Personally, I need to know more about you.

Edit:
Wow! All of our post counts are gone. I spent a lot of time in the Lounge.

[Ampersand]

Ampersand,
The "anchor" for this group is that a huge portion of this group has formed personal relationships over the years.

That's what happens when a forum reaches a level where forum members start getting to know each other and feeling comfortable. At first, though, the forum has to attract that critical mass of regulars before an attractive personality develops. There's also the issue of people eventually moving on, and new forum members needing to show up to spur new discussions and become new regulars. A large forum sort of becomes self-sustaining after awhile as it becomes better known, but it's still good to have a well-known company, another website or, in HOW's case, a magazine feeding it traffic. For that matter, it's almost essential at first.

We just need to have trust in where we land. Personally, I need to know more about you.

Well, short of meeting for lunch sometime, I'm not sure how to go about doing that.

Seriously though, I'm a U.S. graphic designer who's been in the field for going on 30 years now. About half my work is print and the other half web design and development. I've been most everything from a communication director, to creative director to design director to running a freelance business. My BFA is in graphic design and my MFA centered around publication design and typography. Oh yeah, I like dogs.

[phoenix]

Seriously HOW... just bomb this place. Remove it, once and for all. It now serves no purpose other than being a spam haven. There are no good threads, every category has graffiti, it's time to close the doors. It's sad, but really, the time has come.

[Murofwoh]

missing everyone bad...i miss the fights, the love, the conversation, the drama, the laughs, everything that helped me in this crazy profession...if anyone has a great forum where some howies are let me know...just not facebook...

[cuties090]

oh that question really hits the point!

Thank you for your comments. I agree that the Lounge is the lifeblood of the Forum, and we were reluctant to close it down. But it got hit so hard with lewd spam that it was having a negative impact on our search traffic across all of our sites, so we had to pull the plug for the health of the HOW brand.

I also realize that ever since we moved to this platform, the Forum experience has been diminished. You're right—we're having trouble keeping the spam out in the first place, we lack the resources to clean out what gets through daily, and we've had to put annoying safeguards like captchas in place to combat the problem. In light of this reality, we're considering shutting down the entire Forum and instead focusing our efforts on building the HOW community elsewhere. As we contemplate this decision, I'd like to hear from you about what other platform(s) you'd be most likely to use: Facebook, LinkedIn, Google+? It will definitely need to be some form of social media rather than a different Forum platform. I know that social media and Forum communities differ and that there are pros and cons to both—that's why we've tried to continue to support both—but perhaps it's time to face up to the fact that we're spreading ourselves too thin here at HOW HQ.

So, please, let me know how and where you would like to interact with the HOW community if not here. Some of the key decision-makers on our team are out of the office for the next few weeks, but I promise to follow up with information about our decision when we're able to regroup. In the meantime, thank you as always for your input and your patience.

[Murofwoh]

just joined up here:

http://www.graphicdesignforum.com/forum/index.php

[k ern]

just joined up here:

http://www.graphicdesignforum.com/forum/index.php

On my way over there to check it out.