Random Posts (An alternate to side discussions)

[wiebe@CARYA]

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@mcduff wrote:

I propose the new category of "Saints"

This category is for all those members who respond with grace, kindness, and actually keep on responding to threads like this one , no matter how frustrating it can be.

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It definitely takes a saint to be kind and graceful all the time. I won't qualify, I can't resist sarcasm every now and then (msg 51-55) (getting better at restraining and patching though). But I can appreciate sarcasm myself 😊, so it's usually not with bad intent.

[wiebe@CARYA]

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@cbutcher wrote:

Can some lovely moderating type person please remove all of the spam junk on the first page before I suggest a new category of "Flaming Demon"? 👿

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The procedure is to click Options, then pick "Notify Moderator". In my experience, that works very well.

I would expect recent spam to disappear because moderators read it themselves, but it takes a while. For old spam or located in dark corners (document comments), notifying a moderator is recommended.

Not sure how many moderators there are (AFAIK, just knights and some NI members?). The forum is in general pretty clean, so they do a great job.

[cbutcher]

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wiebe@CARYA wrote:

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@cbutcher wrote:

Can some lovely moderating type person please remove all of the spam junk on the first page before I suggest a new category of "Flaming Demon"? 👿

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The procedure is to click Options, then pick "Notify Moderator". In my experience, that works very well.

I would expect recent spam to disappear because moderators read it themselves, but it takes a while. For old spam or located in dark corners (document comments), notifying a moderator is recommended.

Not sure how many moderators there are (AFAIK, just knights and some NI members?). The forum is in general pretty clean, so they do a great job.

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Of course I agree with all of this, but since mcduff mentioned (sort of) emotional response to forum threads, I didn't think mentioning minor frustration about the dozen spam messages covering the front page of the LabVIEW forum was entirely out of place.

I'm sure someone will shortly take care of it, and I did report one post to the moderators, but I felt a dozen reports were likely just me spamming them, so better to avoid - it's pretty obvious once someone sees the page 😕

[wiebe@CARYA]

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@cbutcher wrote:

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wiebe@CARYA wrote:

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@cbutcher wrote:

Can some lovely moderating type person please remove all of the spam junk on the first page before I suggest a new category of "Flaming Demon"? 👿

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The procedure is to click Options, then pick "Notify Moderator". In my experience, that works very well.

I would expect recent spam to disappear because moderators read it themselves, but it takes a while. For old spam or located in dark corners (document comments), notifying a moderator is recommended.

Not sure how many moderators there are (AFAIK, just knights and some NI members?). The forum is in general pretty clean, so they do a great job.

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Of course I agree with all of this, but since mcduff mentioned (sort of) emotional response to forum threads, I didn't think mentioning minor frustration about the dozen spam messages covering the front page of the LabVIEW forum was entirely out of place.

I'm sure someone will shortly take care of it, and I did report one post to the moderators, but I felt a dozen reports were likely just me spamming them, so better to avoid - it's pretty obvious once someone sees the page 😕

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I don't see a lot of spam. Maybe one or two per week. Definitely not dozens per day.

Maybe I'm in a time zone after that of the moderators and before the spammers?

EDIT: Never mind. Today there is lots of spam. I have notified moderators in the past asking to delete all messages from a user, and it's account as well. Not sure if that's possible, I only rarely got feedback from a moderator (saying thanks).

[RavensFan]

The last several days there has been a lot of spam, and it seems to be getting worse.  I start noticing it in the evening hours (I'm in eastern time zone).  I notify the forum administrators are working on the formulas for catching the spam automatically, but so far it doesn't seem to be working.  The spammers may be tweaking their messages just enough to avoid the filters, but honestly they seem to be very similar across the past several days.  I also thought there were rules about limiting the number of posts a new member can generate in a given day.

Knights aren't really moderators.  We don't see the messages when you click Report to Moderator.  They go to the forum administrators at NI such as Kristi Martinez.  However the handful of knights do have a few extra abilities such as marking posts as spam and moving messages to the correct forum.  Many of the knights are in the US, so anything happening in the overnight hours is going to happen while we are sleeping.  I'll tell you it isn't easy to mark multiple messages as spam as it takes a few mouse clicks that happen rather slowly.  I think it is harder to clear them than it is the spammers to generate them with whatever bot they are using.

I really don't understand what value there is to the spammers in infecting the forums with these messages.  They are in Chinese in primarily the English message boards.  Who the heck can read them?  When you convert translate them to google, you see they really don't say much but the same garbage over and over, so they are obvious spam.  Anyone who falls for a Chinese message in an English forum that is obvious spam is an idiot.  I know there are a lot of idiots on the internet, but I don't think very many of them would exist in this forum.  That and when you read the translation, there is no hyperlink to a suspect site or even any contact information to try to "buy" the crap they are selling.

[crossrulz]

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@RavensFan wrote:

I really don't understand what value there is to the spammers in infecting the forums with these messages.

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It is about getting their information on "reputable" sites so that they get more hits from searches like Google.  Even without links, their name or something will show up in the Google database and affect the algorithm.

[Hooovahh]

I don't think this fully applies to me, but I do tend to write long replies on the forums and in work emails.

[jcarmody]

I didn't omit an apostrophe...

I sent an email to some of my colleagues in all of the engineering departments in my company today. The subject of the email was how I've unilaterally decided to replace all of our Programmable Logic Controllers (PLCs) with Raspberry Pi computers and Arduino microcontrollers. Only my boss immediately recognized it as an April Fool's prank. Thankfully, my boss recognized it for what it was! Other people responded with offers to help and several others forwarded it up the chain-of-command!

[Jacobson-ni]

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@jcarmody wrote:

I sent an email to some of my colleagues in all of the engineering departments in my company today. The subject of the email was how I've unilaterally decided to replace all of our Programmable Logic Controllers (PLCs) with Raspberry Pi computers and Arduino microcontrollers. 

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Did you give any phony reasoning behind the decision?

I mean, if you think about it, replacing each $5,000 ControlLogix system with a $20 Arduino would result in 99.6% reduction in hardware costs. It would be silly not to make the change really.

[crossrulz]

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@Jacobson-ni wrote:

I mean, if you think about it, replacing each $5,000 ControlLogix system with a $20 Arduino would result in 99.6% reduction in hardware costs. It would be silly not to make the change really.

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Your math will be a little off when you add in IO and the safety level control.  But, yes, there is an actual argument to be made about replacing PLCs with cheap, small, control boards.