First: We have a new member: Martin Jackson of Australia. Welcome!
I apologize that I have not yet been able to formally make some conclusions
from the December poll. But some of them are being implemented ...
The situation with the recent spam attacks is finally under control. It was so
called referrer spam (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Referer_spam) mostly
from online poker sites, online pharmacies, credit card and other online
financial sites, insurance sites, who want to increase traffic to their sites
by putting links wherever they can (in posts to wikis, etc.). They use lots of
similar domain names and one bans some of them, they are coming in other
reincarnations. This is all done apparently by means of automated programs that
are trying to fill in every form on the web they can find with their ads.
Including the e-mail messages they were sending you from the WDDM site. I have
collected over 3000 of these domains names that are now banned from the site: http://www.world-wide-democracy.net/Wiki/WddmWikiMain/review_blacklist
They are still trying every day, but there has not been any successful
attempt to use the mail forms on the site for some time.
In the process of cleaning the Wiki site from their comments, I have changed
permission on all wiki pages to disallow any non-members to post comments there.
New development: Big thanks to Lee Gottlieb who made a new graphical design
for the WDDM site and suggested a new forum software. I have finally
implemented all this on the site, and tried to integrate it all with the old
Wiki as best as possible. There are still some things to be done but everything
seems to be working well now, and you are welcome to have a look and try the
new forum, and make suggestions what can still be improved or changed.
I have copied your old accounts from the Wiki to the new forum. So you can
just login into the forum without the need for a new registration, using your
old Wiki names and passwords. I suggest that you first go into the "My Control
Center" and do all kinds of setting there. Registered forum users (that is the
right now the current WDDM members) can post without any moderation in all the
discussions (forums). The posts from unregistered users are allowed in some
general forums, but are hidden until approved by a moderator. To prevent those
automatic spamming programs to make a large number of nuisance posts, I have
put in a place a visual verification step (copying a possibly blurred text from
a randomly generated image that only a human can do).
There is also such a step during the registration of the new forum users.
There are two more steps required - verification by e-mail (of the registrant
e-mail address) and finally by a moderator. Is that too much trouble? Given the
spam problem and the fact that after a successful registration the new user can
post and participate at the site without any further restrictions, it does not
seem to me personally too much. What do you think?
I have copied all the relevant posts from the old forum in Wiki to the new
forum - into several "internal" forums that are limited to the WDDM members
only - you will see them only after you log in into the new Forum. (All these
old posts are from December of 2005 made by Bruce - he as the author can
further edit them after he logs in - if he wanted). After that I have removed
the old forum from Wiki.
It remains to unify completely the Wiki and the new Forum, so that there is
a single unified database of users for both packages. SO that for example any
change of the password in one of them is immediately recognized also in the
other. This is not the case yet.
I am not planning to remove Wiki completely as it still contains a lot of
information, and it will be useful also in the future for some tasks.
Also I'll add to the forum a poll module very soon. This will enable us to
do any voting that may be necessary.
I am looking forward for you further suggestions and problem reports, etc.