Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)

[Valka D'Ur]

So the scenario is that someone who has nothing to do with this site, is not a member, and has never posted here, inexplicably decides to cause havoc by registering and imitating someone who is a member?

I think we'll cross that bridge when we come to it.

Seriously, the purpose of this thread is not to ask tortuous casuistic questions about what we'd do in wildly unlikely situations. The title Frequently Asked Questions ought to give a clue to that. It's meant to be for asking useful questions in order to help people use the site.

Plotinus, it's not as "wildly unlikely" as you think. Some people are victims of cyberbullying and stalkers. This is the sort of thing that might happen in such cases; indeed, I have seen it happen on another forum.

 

[Camikaze]

New member restrictions:

Newly registered members may not use signatures, e-mail forum members, post visitor messages, use the private messaging system or join or create social groups, until they have been members for 5 days AND have at least 5 posts.
[...]
If you have 30 posts AND have been registered for 30 days, you can give yourself a custom title and a custom non-animated avatar. The dimension limit of custom avatars is 70x70 pixels and size limit is 4 KB.

If you have 100 posts AND have been registered for 100 days, you can give yourself a custom non-animated avatar up to 100x100 pixels and 10 KB in size.

A new account cannot use the same signature as an existing member, because a new account cannot use a signature. Same for avatars.

 

[aimeeandbeatles]

I wouldnt have asked if I wasnt worried about it.

 

[leif erikson]

Perhaps it might be more beneficial to PM a mod you are familiar with and ask a specific question rather than dancing around the issue?

 

[Plotinus]

All right, perhaps I hadn't thought it through. Well, something like that would get pretty short shrift.

 

[Abaddon]

Really? I don't believe it. Got to be a person already a member of this site, not a randomer.

 

[NickyJ]

Not to continue the painful discussion for Plotinus (), but.... What would happen if it was some sort of agreement by the two posters? (Looking back at April Fools Day, I and some other users used the same avatars, signatures and whatnot.) Does the Staff only act on it if one of the users reports the other?

 

[aimeeandbeatles]

Why would a spambot be red-carded but not post deleted? Insufficent permissions to delete in a specific subforum? I've seen it a bit in the last few days.

 

[azzaman333]

Laziness from the moderators.

 

[Camikaze]

Junior moderators can infract anywhere, but cannot delete or move posts in subforums their not assigned to. Which means we can prevent the spambot from posting more, but sometimes have to wait for another mod to get rid of what's there.

 

[Plotinus]

Not to continue the painful discussion for Plotinus (), but.... What would happen if it was some sort of agreement by the two posters? (Looking back at April Fools Day, I and some other users used the same avatars, signatures and whatnot.) Does the Staff only act on it if one of the users reports the other?

If a member makes an agreement with somebody who isn't a member of the site, to the effect that that person will create a new account that mimics the account of the first person, and post in their style, then it would basically be a sort of cross between impersonating another member and creating a DL. It would probably not be treated particularly leniently. There have been cases where people who have "encouraged" family members to create new accounts, for purposes advantageous to the original member, have been treated as if they were DLs.

As for the April Fools' Day swapping, it is, like all of these things, a matter of discretion. Obviously we understand that nothing malicious is meant there. Just as with the issue whether something is acted on only if it's reported by someone involved: it all depends. For grey areas such as this one can't give definitive answers one way or the other.

 

[Abaddon]

IIRC "someone" created a joke account called "Sid" "Civilization3" and various others all in quick succession for a joke in a particular thread.. those extra accounts were perma'd but the "culprit" was ok, since it had been totally harmless, and they had no history of anything.

 

[aimeeandbeatles]

I remember one time someone once made a username called Thunderfall and then posted that they should disable Unicode in usernames which is how they did it (I don't think they meant to be malicious but to just point it out). And then the resulting quick fix broke all Unicode (non-Latin) characters so some peoples signatures turned into long strings of smileys. Then they fixed that. This wasn't too long ago if I remember right.

EDIT: Earlier this year http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=411070

 

[IglooDame]

Laziness from the moderators.

Are you kidding? spambots and their cargoes are the only fun this job entails.

 

[Moss]

Are you kidding? spambots and their cargoes are the only fun this job entails.

Spambots...fun?

You have clearly lost it.

 

[Valka D'Ur]

That's just because he hasn't done much of it lately.

Seriously, though, the spambot problem could be solved by designating a staff member to keep an eye out for suspicious new accounts - the usernames are usually quite simple to see at a glance. Spot them and promptly ban them. That's what I did on my Doctor Who forum, and it worked quite well. We haven't had any spambots slip through to actually post in over a year.

 

[Camikaze]

That's kinda what we do, actually, though with the numbers, probably only about half get caught that way.

 

[Valka D'Ur]

I also have admin validation on my forums. I realize that's a difficult thing on this one, since 3/4 of our admins are rarely here. But it does cut down on the spambots that get through.

 

[ori]

this was tried and rightfully reversed, because many new users register to ask about some technical problem with the game - they won't stay around to wait a few hours or even a day or two to be activated manually.

 

[Skwink]

That's just because he hasn't done much of it lately.

Seriously, though, the spambot problem could be solved by designating a staff member to keep an eye out for suspicious new accounts - the usernames are usually quite simple to see at a glance. Spot them and promptly ban them. That's what I did on my Doctor Who forum, and it worked quite well. We haven't had any spambots slip through to actually post in over a year.

For the record, I don't in anyway support Strange Name Profiling.