May update

[MarxistRealism]

May 2022 Update

First off – thank you everyone for joining. The response so far has been overwhelmingly positive and even extended outside our little corner of Twitter. I’m so glad this project has resonated with so many people. Hopefully it continues to grow into something collaborative with a positive impact for research and the community.

Over the weekend we encountered our first hiccup: I’m sure some of you noticed starting yesterday the site was being attacked by bots. This is a common SEO scam – bots will register en masse and then spam links to various ads or malware sites. Spamming links on this website (a real site), then makes the malware sites look more legitimate to Google. I have deleted all the topics and banned all the bot users. I appreciate everyone who took the time to report the malicious threads.

To prevent future spambots, registration has been updated to use a question and answer schema instead of an image captcha. This should cut off bot posts (they can’t understand the question) and additionally address accessibility concerns brought forward by user marxonwheels. While I’m verifying this new measure is working, new users will be required to make 3 posts in “moderation queue” before getting full posting privileges. This means a moderator will verify the post/content and ensure there’s a human behind the screen. I am hoping this post approval system will be temporary while I clear out the current registered bots and the new registration system prevents future bots going forward.

To help address the increased workload, I’ll be appointing 2-3 moderators this week. This will ensure posts are being approved within a reasonable time frame and manage any other issues that might arise.

Onto the suggestions!

On Thursday I posted a suggestions megathread here.

OurHiddenHistory has requested a tech FAQ for the ins and outs of posting within the PHPBB system. This makes sense to me – I’ll get something typed up this week.

User youmightbewrong suggested weekly themed threads. This is another great suggestion – if anyone wants to volunteer to run a weekly themed thread (such as Twitter compilations or a book of the month) please sound off! The more people involved the better longevity of the board.

Marxonwheels has also requested a “Current Events” board. This is now live under the “Discussion” category.

Galerkin suggested a section to ask questions about topics they are curious about, and user Stoppeppa mentioned a “Tip of my tongue” board for asking questions about details related to history/parapolitics that other researchers may be able to answer. These felt similar enough to me (and both excellent suggestions as well) so I have added a “Research Questions” section where users can ask about topics they find interesting and other users with expertise can contribute responses or point them in the right direction.

User covertbookreport.com has also asked about naming the forum. I personally named “Genericphpforum” as a kind of tongue in cheek joke but now that it’s live I’m happy to discuss naming alternatives. What do you all think?

Anyway, that’s all I have for now. Again, thank you all for joining this new site and for staying patient while we work through some of these growing pains. I’m really excited about the content people have been posting in the discussion boards and I’m looking forward to seeing and reading more. Cheers to you all for making this site exceed all my expectations already!

[stoppeppa]

Site looks great so far. Sorry to add this here but should we post TV-related topics in the Movie section?

[MarxistRealism]

Site looks great so far. Sorry to add this here but should we post TV-related topics in the Movie section?

This is a perfect place to add this question! If the site gets more popular I'll split them out, but for now I'll update Movies to "Movies & TV"

[SwampGuy]

Just gonna put down my marker as really liking the name GenericPHPForum, but also totally fine if the broader consensus is towards a name change. I think it’s cool to not take ourselves so seriously that we have some overly serious title for the forum.

[stoppeppa]

I cannot stress this enough but please do not add any features that will generate 'power user' crap. No badges, no points you can track on profiles, none of that because sites like that immediately become a mess of power users having a sense of authority or 'dunking' on people with criticism. Not insinuating that this site would ever get to twitter level in size and scope, but I think you get my point.

[hagane]

i gotta say i love the name and it had a lot to do with why i leapt to register. i expect the more it grows the more the charmingly tongue in cheek feel will be complimented. recently i learned that what.cd came back as [redacted] and it's a lot of fun of saying "something something on the [redacted] forums" with that actually being what it's called.