Reply With QuoteHmm. I'm not sure. I don't handle the technical side of things, so let me ask Robbie and/or the other admins.
Gallery Permissions
I just noticed that it's no longer possible for people who aren't logged in to view images in my galleries, or things that I included in posts from my gallery. That never used to be a problem. I suspect a version upgrade has rejiggered the permissions, or something like that.
What do I need to do in order make it possible for anyone to view my images, even if they're not logged in?
Hmm. I'm not sure. I don't handle the technical side of things, so let me ask Robbie and/or the other admins.
As I said, I'm not proficient in the technical side, but here's a response from someone who is:
Originally Posted by Redrobes
Hrm! Well, that's certainly a good reason for it.
A pity, though. I suspect that a lot of casual visitors coming in off web searches will just leave rather than go to the trouble of creating an account so they can view the images.
I would have thought so too but I have the stats now. Breaking 2024 into two groups. One (A) from jan 1st to end of June (6 months) and the other (B) from start of Aug to end of year (5 months) such that we dismiss July where all of this kicked off and the change was made we have:
Number of users who signed up... A: 3923 B: 9145
However, the number of users who made it through the sign up process and made at least 1 post... A: 97 and B: 80
That means 11550 users signed up but did not complete the process - I.e. spammers. Then there were a few more that signed up and got through the process and then either never spammed or we booted out. But we have a 11500:177 spammer to legit ratio. Or 1.5% of people who sign up are legit and 98.5% of signups are spam bots.
Anyway to answer the question, since 97 signed up in 6 months before the change vs 80 in 5 months after the change it means we have a 97:96 ratio of whether it affected our legit user signup. And so we can pretty conclusively say - no - it made no difference.
I think people come here because they want to and engage with us regardless of the hype of the pretty images. Which is why I think were a great place to hang out and the last of the great forums where people can exchange views without the general nastiness of the rest of the internet.
Not much of the stats are too surprising but the uptick in signups without completion shows that were under increased spamming attack. In 2023 we had 9152, in 2022 it was 5240, 2021 it was 2393, 2020 it was 5225 but that was covid year. In 2019 it was 1505. So as you can see we now about 10x amount of bots signing up to spam us now compared to the 2019 era. And were not 10x more popular as a site. This is more likely to be about a 10x increase in available bandwidth that everybody has access to. The bots just run faster. I am seeing a similar up tick in other website traffic that I manage. The internet has become unimaginably toxic over the last few years.
One last point to make if you are a guest wanting to sign up. Since we have 98.5% bot signup then its best to not be too weird or do anything too unusual in the signup until you're in or have 5 posts. Because we cant see the wood for the trees.
The other thing which has occurred to me form these stats is that this whole site and forum probably only has between 6 months and 2 years left before it will get overwhelmed by spam and AI.
Last edited by Redrobes; Yesterday at 06:21 PM.
I think at some point we're probably going to have to upgrade to a newer service, like Discourse. I'd be devastated to see this place go but I suspect there's only so far VBulletin can take us; most old forums end up going with an upgrade to Discourse, as much as I don't like it it's the closest modern parallel and you can get something that functions reasonably similarly.
The crazy thing about the spam wave ya'll get is that I periodically get emails from people who want to promote something on Cartographer's Guild or sell you a related domain name or whatever and I'm like "...I'm not even a moderator, I'm literally just a member of the site."
What does future-proofing look like if none of the admin staff have the access to implement something like IP range blocks?
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Its not that the IP blocks are the real issue. I have been offered the ability, but it just didn't happen for reasons I cant discuss securely, but I could re-ask and probably make it happen. But that's not the issue. The issue is that bandwidth is going up and the bots are soon going to get the level of AI capabilities that mean it wont be possible to detect them from real people. That's especially true for a site like this where not for everybody has English as their first language and we are, and must be, fairly accommodating to imperfect grammer. Its only a matter of time before this site, and discourse, and in fact all social media sites and any site that is a collection of real people talking to each other are going to get wiped out - completely - utterly.
The only reason this site is not over run with bots is because right now they are still too stupid and obvious. But that is not likely to remain that way for much longer. I suspect that large corps with a lot of money already have bots which are good enough to pass off now but are not letting them loose on sites like the guild because were such small fry. But soon everybody is going to have them. At that point its going to be game over.
We have a slight advantage in that the images they produce will lag in quality against the text by some considerable amount. So for "members" who never ever post an image that is unique to them, they could be a bot. For those who produce art, esp those with a recognizable style, we will know they are real.
Posting Permissions
