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Well, not *all*.

I am a bit "off" and proud of it.

Perhaps many of us here are that way....

Gee, this is exactly why I feel like I belong here!

Resurrecting this thread with an idea that might help cut down on ads for handbags and running shoes.

What would people (including Mark) think about creating a delay period (say, 48 hours) between registration and when a person can post? Two days is not too long, but it's long enough that the spammers may forget about the site and move elsewhere.

The delay period should be noted in the forum guidelines as an effort to reduce spam, obviously.

I wouldn't like that; I think a two-day gap between taking the "right, now I want to post here" decision and being able to do so would put off many humans, and we'd feel a lot less welcoming to the people who need to be here.

I'd be in favour of something, if we can find something that cuts down the spam without putting off new members. I think our spam problem here is pretty small really. If technically feasible, we might consider a system that did moderation of the first post or 3 that a new member makes (simple "is it spam?" moderation only, with enough people authorised to do it that the delay this imposed would be no more than a few hours). I'd even be willing to be one of those doing that trivial moderation job (whereas I would not be willing to do any moderation job involving actual judgement of the behaviour of humans). I doubt if many spammers can be bothered to make a non-spam post or three before they get the chance to post spam, so I guess that such a system would cut our spam to virtually zero. Something that might be completely automatable and at least partially effective would be a system whereby the first post a new member makes is not permitted to contain links. What options are feasible depends of course on the underlying BB software.

Gossip regarding spam. �I received an email that reminded me that all the chain letters, everything that says fwd this, is a spam service with something embedded to harvest active email addresses. �It also mentioned that now robo-dialing machines are calling people's �phone numbers to find out what times of day you're most likely to answer your phone so a live telemarketer can call you. �The email suggested dialing ####### quickly confuses the machine and kicks your number out of the system. �I was getting those calls and I didn't know why, so I thought I'd share.

Also, I saw this great rule at the bottom of a playground sign that seemed to sum up part of the gist of this thread:
"If you see anything that does not seem right please tell the staff immediately."

Also I saw a great quote in a political e-mail (where, ironically the quote was about all I agreed with).
"Error of Opinion may be tolerated where Reason is left free to combat it." - Thomas Jefferson in an e-mail

Has there been talk of having user moderators? I meant to ask this before, but it slipped my mind.

I don't know how much I like that idea, given that we have at least one user who's PMing people to tell them what they can and can't write.

So, I guess I can count myself lucky or non-offensive since I don't know what you're talking about! (i.e. -- I haven't rec'd one of those pms -- yet!)

Read this thread.

I've been PMed saying that something that I thought was bland might have offended someone somewhere; I recall that at least one other has reported something similar. (Anyone else?)