Why is my reply to a topic being moderated?

[Ian PParticipant @ianp]

A few minutes ago I made a reply (using the quote feature) in the ‘MEW341 How to build a seismometer’ thread.

I pressed the Submit button, waited the usual 20-15 seconds and instead of my reply showing up, it was replaced by a yellow box containing ‘This post is awaiting moderation’.

Anybody any idea why my post would need moderating? (Mortons team are included in the anybody, no need to be shy)

Ian P

[Michael GilliganParticipant @michaelgilligan61133]

My guess is that someone is ‘messing-about in the gearbox’

A little while ago I needed to resubmit a post because ‘connection to the server was lost’

 

… could possibly be a problem this end, but my broadband is usually rock-solid

MichaelG.

[Harry WilkesParticipant @harrywilkes58467]

I get the same if my post/ reply contains an emoji

H

[Ian PParticipant @ianp]

It has appeared now, (about one hour after posting) so whatever it was will probably never come to light.

Ian P

[JasonBModerator @jasonb]

There are various reasons a post gets moderated. The lone emoji that Harry mentions is one due to a post having to contain a minimum amount of words.

I would think yours got stopped due to you quoting all the links that Joe had posted ( Joe’s was also flagged up for moderation), many of the spam posts we get will have a list of links so it is the systems way of making sure suspect posts don’t get onto the forum like a list of medications, fake certificates or porn sites.

One good reason to edit any quoted replies to just what is really needed.

I approved it.

[SillyOldDufferModerator @sillyoldduffer]

The forum applies an automated spam/ham check to posts.   For obvious reasons, exactly what defines ‘spam’ is not made public; best not to make it too easy for the baddies by listing all the traps they need to avoid!

As automated spam checks are far from perfect, producing many false positives, suspect posts are blocked temporarily for a human moderator to decide.   Nothing personal about spam checking:  an automated checker typically runs through a long list of checks, perhaps building a ‘likely to be spam’ score based on origin and other metadata (suggesting a bot), the use of banned words, use of irrelevant words, dodgy images, and the presence of external links.

I think Jason is correct: Joe’s post consisted entirely of links, which a spam checker is likely to consider suspicious, and then Ian’s post triggered the same alert by repeating them.   The software is unlikely to be smart enough to recognise that the links were approved in an earlier post – it just rescans the text of anything new.

Three of Joe’s links are extra suspect because they’re not encrypted, using http: rather than https.   This may be what triggered the block.  Un-encrypted links caused a lot of security problems in the early days of the internet, and have been strongly discouraged for over a decade.   They’re typically found on either:

• elderly or poorly maintained web-sites, often where the owner did a good job donkeys years ago, but has now run out of enthusiasm or money.
• new sites, probably created by an amateur who hasn’t read the security and privacy chapter, or finks it’s all too complicated.
• new criminal sites, deliberately set-up so the owner can take advantage of the security loopholes.

Debatable as to whether nanny forum should protect members from dodgy posts or not; some folk believe personal freedom overrides all other considerations.  I think that’s extremely naive and am grateful that the forum provides a basic level of protection, even if it is over the top sometimes.

Dave

[Ian PParticipant @ianp]

Thank you Jason and Dave, it all makes sense now.

I usually whittle down the quoted text and pictures to just the part needed for the context of my reply, this time I forgot.

I Know images and pictures from the old forum have not been carried over, but there are no links to any of Joe’s old posts in his profile, is that correct?

Ian P

[JasonBModerator @jasonb]

Click Joe’s name on one of his posts and when his profile comes up click “forums” and you will find them (complete with images)

[Nicholas FarrParticipant @nicholasfarr14254]

Hi, not everything has been carried over, or if it has, it’s not accessible, as some of the pictures that I know that I’ve posted on the old forum, cannot be found, and what a palaver it is to find anything midstream in all the old posts as you have to start at one end and scroll through every set of pages one at a time, to find something mid stream, so now I don’t bother, and I just upload my original photos.

Regards Nick.

[JasonBModerator @jasonb]

Images and pictures from the old forum have been carried over in threads.

Albums that may have contained those images have not.

[SillyOldDufferModerator @sillyoldduffer]

The old forum stored managed images very differently from the new one, and it caused many complaints!  To publish a photo, the user had to download the image,  into a special repository, containing ‘Albums’.  Problems included:

• The user had to create his albums and then understand using them was a two-stage process.   Not slick, and unlike anything else on the internet.
• Only JPGs were supported.
• During the download, the forum re-sized the image so that, once installed in an album, it would quickly transmit across the original slow dial-up internet, and speed-up display back when most computers took several seconds to put a large photo on screen.  Unfortunately a big photograph could take so long to copy and shrink that the forum process often timed-out and failed.   So common was this before I upgraded my internet connection from 10 to 60Mbs that I always resized my photos before copying them to the forum.  Yuk.
• For reasons unclear, possibly due to the resize process, images stored in albums occasionally lost their sense of which way was up!  I looked at this problem repeatedly and couldn’t find the cause.   Possibly I missed something obvious, because there are several ways in which a digital image can decide orientation,  but they all seemed to be correct.   When a photo oriented incorrectly, it could only be rotated by a moderator, who could only edit it in a post, not in the album, with some risk correcting the photo would mangle the text, causing another problem taking several minutes to fix.  So I wouldn’t rotate a broken photo unless I knew I had time to fix the text as well, and always kept my fingers crossed when doing it.   Something like 1 in 15 photo rotations would break a post’s text format.
• Lots of time spent explaining to new and not so new members how to post images using Albums, including why the perfectly normal methods used by other web-sites to post images didn’t work.

The new forum doesn’t have these warts!

Although hard to learn and use, the Album approach has one major advantage.  Photos are organised and stored as copies by the forum, which kept them safe whatever the rest of the internet was doing.   There are many examples of websites losing images because members hosted them on a ‘free’ service that disappeared later, or turned off the public display feature.    Also problems where people link to photos they don’t realise require an account or password to access.   (Often the cause when an image works for the owner and no-one else can see it.)

On balance though, the way the new forum manages photos without Albums is an a improvement. More types of media are allowed, and the mechanism is both simpler and like what everyone else on the web does.  Although well suited to average needs, the new forum doesn’t provide a sensible way of organising photographs;  if that’s needed, the user has to provide his own system, which is a problem for enthusiasts who put many images in their posts.   In the run up to the new forum, one of our clever members, sorry can’t remember who, provided a script that would copy Albums back to a PC, retaining the organisation.   I bitterly regret not using it:  although I have all my original forum images, they’re stored in date-time order, making it very difficult to find forum related material.

Dave

 

[JasonB]

On JasonB Said:

Images and pictures from the old forum have been carried over in threads.

Albums that may have contained those images have not.

I was aware of what did and what didn’t carry over but when I looked  at Joe’s profile nothing seemed to work when I tried these…

Activity
Profile
Forums
Gallery
Classifieds
Topics Started
Replies Created
Engagements
Favourites

I have just tried again and (although I am not sure what I selected) was able to see Joe’s posts.

Why we need so many different buttons I have no idea!

Ian P

 

 

[JasonB]

On JasonB Said:

Images and pictures from the old forum have been carried over in threads.

Albums that may have contained those images have not.

Hi JasonB, yes I’m aware about album photos not being carried over, but my point was that I was trying to locate a post in the old forum that I made, which had a photo attached to it, this was a little while ago, but although I found the thread, which was back in 2018, my particular post and hence the photo was not found, so not everything has successfully been carried over, and after taking a fair while to get to the thread in the first place, I concluded that it’s a waste of my time looking for things in the middle of the old forum.

Regards Nick.

[Michael GilliganParticipant @michaelgilligan61133]

< Copied >

.

There is clearly something

There are clearly some things wrong with the new database, and the searching thereof … but it may help to know that this [one of many options] gives a reasonable-looking list of Joe’s “engagements”

https://www.model-engineer.co.uk/members/josephnoci1/forums/engagements/

MichaelG.

[Ian P]

On Ian P Said:

[…] Why we need so many different buttons I have no idea!

 

Typical I.T. Developer stuff … they are “Solutions in search of a Problem”

MichaelG.

 

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