spammers

Hi all , I enjoy this forum and there are some very skilled model engineers post here with some absolutely amazing work.
I have noticed however that there appears to be no control over membership and posts are appearing that are from people that I would describe as spammers with no interest whatsoever in model engines.
I have also seen members work stolen and posted on foreign , mainly far eastern sites , where it would appear that the thieves claim it to be their own work.
Some of you may know that I have my own forum at http://www.unionsteammodels.co.uk.
Having suffered from both the above we decided to give members an option to post in a "members only" area which can only be accessed by accredited persons.
We also vet any would-be member , checking for any listing against their IP and have a questionaire which is viewed by admin before acceptance.
needless to say we have no Chinese members!
I realise that this involves work - I do it myself - but in my opinion a few genuine members are far better than a hundred with ulterior motives.

Hi Abby, while it is true that both things do happen on occasion, I do find that the mods are very good about removing spam posts very quickly and with mods all around the world its a pretty good bet that one or more will be online at any given time. The issue of stolen content has been discussed recently in fact with suggestions as to watermarking pictures snd such to at least make it harder for others to claim it as their own work. I for one am bad about that and don't watermark pictures though I may begin doing so. Unfortunately its a sign of the times and for me at least I feel sure the ones copying content are far more adept at computers than I am. I mean if they can copy and distribute Microsoft software without regard for copyright laws then I guess I feel I have little chance to stop them myself.

As to open membership vs. membership upon approval, I think so long as the forum is managed as well as it is this isn't a huge issue. Sure the occasional spammer gets in but they are gone as quickly and don't seem to return. It would seem to be more work for the mods to have to pre-approve newcomers that to remove the spam that does creep in, but they can weigh in on that themselves. This has been, is, and I hope will remain a friendly and open environment in which newcomers to the hobby can feel just as at home as more experienced members.

Just my 2 cents and I look forward to hearing the opinions of others. Its not a bad discussion to have from time to time.

Bill

Hi
Speaking as one who has had my work appear on a chinese site. see this post

http://www.homemodelenginemachinist.com/index.php?topic=16479.0

I agree something should be done.

On the Model Engineer forum they have suffered spammers and they now vet the first post of a newcomer before it gets to the page.

Only time will tell if this works , but it's a start.

Roy.

there appears to be no control over membership and posts are appearing that are from people that I would describe as spammers with no interest whatsoever in model engines.

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I'm lucky, I've only noticed two of them in over a year.

I have also seen members work stolen and posted on foreign, mainly far eastern sites, where it would appear that the thieves claim it to be their own work.

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Been there seen nothing of my works, yet. :'(
Maybe next project? ;D

Marcello

If you use a photo storage service such as Photoshop, you should resize your pictures before uploading them. John (Bogstandard) put me onto Faststone, a free program for doing that

http://www.faststone.org/FSResizerDetail.htm

There are many free resizers available but Faststone includes the ability to watermark the picture as it is resized. Once the parameters are setup, it's extremely straightforward to prepare a batch of pictures for upload to your favorite storage service.

on that note, marv, is there a recommended size to resize to? I've been doing 800w x 533h, but those seem smaller than what I see others use...

(i use those numbers because my conversion program requires both to be manually input and that's the way it divides out for my camera's images)

- Ryan

I use 800 x 600 which is the maximum that Photoshop allows. That seems to be a good compromise between too tiny to pick out detail and so big that one has to scroll to get from one scale division to another.

It used to be that an 800 x 600 pixel picture would show up without a scroll bar beneath it when I viewed it using Firefox and my 19" diagonal monitor. Somewhere along the line something changed and now I need to scroll a bit to see the right side of the picture. Most times I use the expedient of right clicking on the picture and selecting "View Image" from the resulting drop-down menu. This rescales everything, even the multi-megapixel monstrosities some folks put up.

Membership has to be controlled in order to control spammers, especially if you don't have the mods to control what happens after new members join.

What I woud not recommend is closing off forum information to members only.
I don't do that, everything I have on my fourm is open and visible to all, no membership required, and that is the way all forums should be.

You cannot advance the hobby by limiting what can be seen to just members.
Do what is best for the hobby and don't worry about the rest.

So what if it gets copied.
Does that really affect us?

Marcello sums it up very well:

"Been there, seen nothing of my works yet. :'(
Maybe next project?" ;D

UNIcastings said:

What I would not recommend is closing off forum information to members only.
I don't do that, everything I have on my forum is open and visible to all, no membership required, and that is the way all forums should be.

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I haven't been around long enough to have any say so, but I have to agree with not limiting read access to members only. I participate on a lot of forums from tortoises to spitfires. As a rule, I lurk around for a few weeks to see if it is a group that I really want to associate with before I join. If I can't lurk, I don't join.

It is not that having me as a member is any great prize, but if you want to expose the public to your topic, you have to let them have access.

UNIcastings said:

So what if it gets copied.
Does that really affect us?

Click to expand...

Get back to me on that after one of your projects shows up on a forum under someone else's name.

Each forum has its' own way of doing things.

Don't think for one minute, that the way we do it has not been the subject of considerable discussion with different and opposing inputs from members of our management team.

We hope we have the balance about right and with our global team, spammers and the like are removed by those who are awake, whilst others of us are asleep.

We appreciate input to this vexing part of forum operation and maintenance and we thank you for your views and support.

Best Regards
Bob

I think water making of pictures will be the easiest way to stop people claiming our work for themselves, I'll be looking to do that from now on.
Until reading this post I had never heard of people doing this. Will be more carefull from now.

mklotz said:

Get back to me on that after one of your projects shows up on a forum under someone else's name.

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Jesse Livingston copied my Dad's Bernay engine and published it in Live Steam magazine in 2006.
My Dad never said a word to anyone about that, nor did I, other the fact that I have mentioned that my Dad built his Bernay in 2004.
Ask anyone about a Bernay, and chances are they will say "Yes, the one designed and built by Jesse Livingston in Live Steam in 2006".

So yes it happens.
Who cares.
It is about advancing the hobby.
Leave the egos at home.

'ang on there Pat, if my recollection is correct, Jesse gave full recognition of Bob's design at the time. Jesse worked from drawings by Bill Bowser, which were a cooperative venture between the two of them taking the picture and animation of Bob's engine and 'reverse engineering' it.

Tel-

I was not accusing Jesse or Bob Bowser of doing anything wrong, on the contrary, they did it right, and it was right to do it.

Jesse could have just said "Bob, do you want to publish your drawings and photos in live steam?", since it had already all been worked out and documented, but that is not the point I am trying to make. After all, they both lived only a few miles from each other in the same state.

And no, it is not the same as Jesse just putting his name on Bob's drawings, although Jesse or rather Live Steam did use Bob's photo without asking him.

But I still say so what.
Nobody is going to control what China does.
I can remove a watermark completely with no trace in minutes.

So do you want to build engines and document that for the next generation, or worry about what goes on in China?

We have a lot of members here because we don't prejudge. We do have some spammers that come on board, but they don't last long and some are caught while they are still posting.

Let me give a couple of examples of prejudgement and how easy it can go wrong.

Lets say we have a castle rule that states a person must swim across the moat filled with alligators to get inside. People really want to get in the castle to see and learn whats in there and they start swimming the moat after all they all feel they are good people. But the alligators eat 8 out of 10 of them. That's their job, their belly's are full, no bad person has ever made it into the castle and the alligators are patting each other on their backs. . But all of those 10 people were good and the alligators prejudged 8 people too quickly. The result is the castle doesn't have enough diverse good people to show other people how they can be good too.

Now there is another castle rule. You can't wave the banner in the castle grounds promoting a different castle. The punishment is tar & feathering and banishment. After all, you have shown yourself as a "banner spammer" on the castle grounds. But wait, there may be more good people over there. What is the harm of seeing how that castle operates.


The rule here has always been to welcome everyone with open arms, treat every question asked with respect and help the other person become good at what they are wanting to do. If a person proves themselves to be a spammer, then cut their nuts off and let them bleed. Its the friendly non-prejudgemental way to do it.

Kenny

We actually do kind of sort of have a little bit of vetting process. Virtually everyone here will, upon the first question asked by someone, ask them to post an intro post in the welcome section.

This isn't an active vetting process, and I doubt anyone does it with that in mind - but it would certainly raise flags with a few of us, if someone were to simply refuse to post such an intro message. it takes only a few minutes, can obviously give us more info to tailor our answers to them, and hurts nothing.

- Ryan

The mods vetting seems to be working very well.

A simple further security measure might be to deny access to the downloads section to newbies for the first month etc. but somehow I think that's contrary to the spirit of this great site. Maybe as little as a week might be sufficient to weed out the frauds.

When I post plans, photos etc. I am accepting that I am placing them in the public domain - I really couldn't care less if someone decides to sell them as kits or plans.

But it does burn my butt if they claim it as their own work.

My own metric version of Gerry Dykstra's beam engine always credits Gerry with the original design for this reason.

2c

Ken

Just as an aside, you don't need to become a member to rip posts off many sites.

If you can get to the post to read it, you can usually copy it, pictures and all.


John

I agree fully with Kenny's view that:-

"The rule here has always been to welcome everyone with open arms, treat every question asked with respect and help the other person become good at what they are wanting to do. If a person proves themselves to be a spammer, then cut their nuts off and let them bleed. Its the friendly non-prejudgemental way to do it."

I further agree that the moderators do an excellent job, in that I can't actually recall having seen anything from spammers on this site (which I access most days and read most unread posts), whereas the odd one has crept into the Model Engineer site - though again they get removed pretty quickly.

My view is stick with what we have and then do as Kenny suggests if people are shown to be spammers.

Regards Tom