Registration to forum?

[The Liquidator]

Hi ftack

In a thread on bullets I noted that someone said that they had googled their way straight into the forum and was able to freely post as "guest".

This raises an interesting point as to whether there should be some control of access to the forum or, rather, those who post here.

I would venture to suggest that, whilst this is not OOo support, most people use it as such, and those wish to post a genuine query will be generally willing to supply their e-mail address. It would help to do away with some of the crank postings we have had of late.

Contentious point, I know, but I for one have no fear of those who come here. What does everyone else think? Don't know whether this is right for a poll.

Ian

[DannyB]

Are we really having a real problem with crank postings yet? (Yes, an occaisional minor annoyance.)

The site owner has very recently arranged things so that crank postings are likely to get deleted right away.

On the subject of new users, Newbies or Guests, I find myself answering a lot of questions from them lately. I don't take this as a bad thing. I just try to provide a good quality answer, and hope that the original user reads the answer, or that possibly other readers here will read it and benefit. In many cases the questions are ones that could be answered by scouring over hundreds of past postings in the Macros and API section (which is where I hang). But I take it as a positive sign that more people are lookiing at programming OOo for the first time -- and this pleases me very much. After all, last February 03, I was new to this myself and knew absolutely nothing about programming OOo. (That's 2003, btw, this century that I started programming OOo. I joined OOoForum in April.)

Anyone should be encouraged by the good news that if you are willing to seriously warp your brain, solve puzzles, gather together obscure bits of information from diverse incomprehensible sources, you really can learn to program OOo.

See my recent crank post "ENLARGE THE SIZE OF YOUR recent files list" in Macros and API. Is the technique to do this documented anywhere? Not anywhere onthe planet I can find, except in that posting, and embodied within the macro that does it. Well, maybe documented in the sense that I was able to find enough information scattered about to write the macro. And I will say that OOo docs are great (in fact outstanding compared to any other open source project of this large scope) and getting better all the time.

Although it may be somewhat annoying to long time visitors to see FAQ's asked frequently, this is a sign that more and more people are stumbling upon this site. Maybe we can help them to find it a valuable resource. My motivation in spending the time I do here is to (A) have fun, (B) pass on what I have learned (as Yoda says).
_________________
Want to make OOo Drawings like the colored flower design to the left?

[The Liquidator]

No, we are not getting too many cranks at the moment, and I suppose the ability to post a (potentially daft) question anonymously will make some people feel more comfortable with things. The forum is growing, however. Hopefully many of those who join as "guest" later sign up.

One thing that supports your position is what I see has happened at the StarOffice Forum, which does require registration. The last couple of times I looked, it seemed much quieter than this one. Don't know if it's still the same as I've not been there for a while.

It was just a thought, which I have already forgotten about

Ian

[JohnV]

I think one of the reasons you don't see heavy posting in the Star Office forums is that most who pay attention there soon learn that the heavy duty stuff is going on over here. I did. I still participate there also because the technical support that should be there from Sun is hit and miss, at best.

[cwchia]

Just have to agree with JohnV. I has been at least 3 months I never visited the SO forum. In fact I started going there before I found this lovely place

Now I only occasionally visit SO Forum, mainly to check out things like whether there are any improvements to the cranky Adabas that comes with it, the MS Office and WP converters etc, if they are really up to mark, I will consider getting SO, otherwise I am extremely confortable with OOo (but how I wish if it has a simple-to-use relational database like MS Access )

[JR]

As a recent "Guest", may I offer the suggestion that being a guest for a while, mostly lurking, but occasionally trying a post on a subject of personal interest is the only real way to see if the forum is the sort what one wants or not. It would be pity to drive genuine "seekers" away, surely.

The only trouble, of course is, as Grouch Marx pointed out - I am not sure I would not want to be a member of a club that would accept a person like me!

JR

[anvilsoup]

You're right, JR. Nobody likes lurkers unless you've got a detector nearby and a siege tank.

[JR]

Is that right? I'm not sure if I follow your meaning. I have always heard it is good to lurk for a while before leaping in with all feet.

[DannyB]

If you are not confident in yourself and of the nature of the group, then it is indeed wise to lurk. In contrast, last April, I just jumped right in with both feet in my mouth with questions about programming OOo and licensing questions to see if I was allowed to do so. (Never did get a proper answer, btw.)
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Want to make OOo Drawings like the colored flower design to the left?

[draude]

I personally like sites that don't require registration. I agree registration-only sites can be a little 'cleaner' but I've noticed that some spammers have no problem registering beforehand. They just register with a phony e-mail and post as a user. I tend to think the benefits of anonymous posting outweigh the disadvantages.

Also, I use google extensively and there's nothing worse than clicking on a relevant link only to find that the content is only available to registered users! Google actually sends more visitors here than any other resource including openoffice.org.

Ed

[Guest]

Hello, I'm a long time lurker.
I don't currently use OOo because here at my work I can't avoid to use MS Office.
But I istalled it on 3 or 4 computers. The fact is that, being free, it offers completely different possibilities. For example if you have a computer with serious problems with Office and you work in a big structure it can happen that the assistance will let you expect a week for a reistallation of the software. If you NEED to work on that computer you can install OOo and be productive or, at least, read MS Office documents.
You have a PDF generator that can be used by everyone: they don't have to set another printer but click on a button.
And so on...

For me these forums are extremely useful to know what OOo can do. If I know that I can do some tasks quickly with OOo, I'll use it for these tasks. If I talk with a friend of mine which has a computer shop I can say him "don't you know that OOo can do this?" or let him try one of the beautiful DannyDraws PowerTools to impress him (I hope I'll convince him to install/distribute OOo).

So please don't block me from reading. Even lurking I try to give my contribute!

Thanks for your help

[ftack]

As people have seen again, many old threads are being revived due to an organized robot attack sending spam replies. Now, I am doing the same with this thread, although intentionally.

Robot attacks like we have seen today and around 19 juin are an argument in favour of registration. I agree with Draude that the site should remain directly accessible ... for viewing. If you get here from a Google link, you should see the content right away.

I am however in favour of imposing registration as a requirement to post in this forum. This will not prevent spammers, but it will make their job a bit more difficult. Certainly it will diminish the chances of getting automated mass spam like we have seen twice recently. Each time these people would want to post mass spam, they would have to go at least through the effort of manual registration. If they want to post under different user names, they'd have to register several times. Currently, all they have to do is push a buttom to flood our excellent forum with spam. As another benefit on the side of the administrator, posts of registered users can be tracked down easily, including these of registered 'abusers'.

Something will need to be done, I am afraid. We as moderators cannot mass-delete particular posts. If we could, for me, we could leave things like they are. A moderator would stumble on one of these messages and delete all posts from that user in one go. This is not possible currently for moderators. Two weeks ago, I have spend my saturday evening with deleting about seventy of these spam posts using the web interface. Clearly, that's not a 'sustainable' solution.

I thus see two possibilities of coping with such mass spam attacks

* Require registration to be able to post messages (anyone, also not registered, can view)

* Implement tools for mass deletion to the moderators. This obviously would pose risks if one of our moderators is before his screen too late at night ... Perhaps an 'alarm' procedure to the Administrator, where the admin could do the mass deletion would be safer.

[goa103]

Hello,

Today I got 5 topic reply notifications and none of them is a real notification, replies are just spams :

http://www.oooforum.org/forum/viewtopic.php?p=39028#39028
http://www.oooforum.org/forum/viewtopic.php?p=39029#39029
http://www.oooforum.org/forum/viewtopic.php?p=39163#39163
http://www.oooforum.org/forum/viewtopic.php?p=39188#39188
http://www.oooforum.org/forum/viewtopic.php?p=39257#39257

I imagine that dozens of other spams were posted by the same spammers on the forums !

So I think you should forbid guests from posting. A guest that posts a new thread doesn't really expect any answer as it can't get a notification. A guest that replies doesn't really pay attention to what it's saying as it can't be tracked. But more important, a community is built upon its members, not guests and unknown users, to help each other, we should be able to better know each other.

So today I got 5 spams, what's next ?

JM
_________________
An OOo mascot designer

[DannyB]

I have deleted several hundred of the troll/spams. If you get e-mails notifying you of replies to threads you may be watching. You can probably expect to get a number of e-mails that lead to non existant messages.
_________________
Want to make OOo Drawings like the colored flower design to the left?

[cwchia]

I think Ian and myself were loitering around when the attack started. I first have about 10 replies alert email and the replies are all spams. I then logout and login again so that those spams will not show as unread posts to me. During the half hour or so I have another hundreds of posts pouring in. Other then sending distress email and PM to the moderators, Ian and myself can only sit there and do nothing but watching the %&*&$@#$*)&*^ spammer SH*T here.