LeafLabs Garden

A place to share, learn, and grow...

1. 

   higwoshy
   Member

   I have only just noticed the tag cloud to the left (forum front page), with the most prominent tags being "gold-bridesmaid-dresses", "pink prom dresses" etc. Do you have any in blue?

   Posted 3 years ago #
2. 

   gbulmer
   Moderator

   higwoshy - no blue, pink goes much better with my eyes :-)

   Thanks for pointing this out, but it needs LeafLabs to do something to fix it.
   

   .
                                     *****************************
                                     ***      LEAFLABS         ***
                                     ***   PLEASE Delete the   ***
                                     ***     garbage tags      ***
                                     *****************************

   Some of those tags have more than 10 pages of posts, and all we can do is delete them one at a time. I have spent the last 10 minutes doing that, and I am not making an impression on them. (So I am done for today)

   Posted 3 years ago #
3. 

   poslathian
   LeafLabs

   I killed the tags for now until we can get into the mysql database and see how best to clear it out, which might take a while.

   The tags are a very useful feature and I would very much like to keep them!

   Thanks for the help!

   Posted 3 years ago #
4. 

   gbulmer
   Moderator

   poslathian - IMHO the tags are only a nice to have.

   Worse, LeafLabs doesn't clear the forum often enough to appreciate how much spam the forum gets. You rely on the good will of the users.

   While tags can be used to generate what look like spam advertising phrases, then they are a magnet for spam.
   We (I think mostly cren and me, and recently I think mostly me) end up cleaning up because LeafLabs are not around enough to do it.
   This forum would look awful quite quickly if spam is left unchecked. It would push all user contributions off the first forum page. The forum would look like a ghost town.

   I don't feel it is fair to the people who do the clean up to leave in place something which attracts spam.
   I don't feel I should ignore it all and leave cren to cleaning it all up instead, so I feel I need to do it.

   If you switch tags off till you have a fix, then they are not a spam magnet, and we can probably cope.

   Posted 3 years ago #
5. 

   crenn
   Moderator

   Lately I haven't been on this forum as much (uni life is busy currently) but whenever I see spam, I'll log in and get rid of it. So recently it's most likely mostly you gbulmer. I'll try to come once or day or so after Thursday (My workload is due to lighten up a little at that time).

   Posted 3 years ago #
6. 

   gbulmer
   Moderator

   cren - I wasn't trying to say you weren't tidying up. You do. Further, as well as doing a lot of work to moderate the forum, you also answer questions, and contribute software.

   I was a bit grumpy, and feeling that poslathian's "I would very much like to keep them!" wasn't recognising the fact that we actually do much of the clean-up for LeafLabs. I had spent more than 10 minutes deleting tags from posts, and the number of pages in the search for one tag was unaffected, so there were more than 10 more pages of posts.

   If LeafLabs do the tidy up promptly, I don't mind what functionality is retained. But when they rely for tidy-up on volunteers, I think our view should be considered too.

   Posted 3 years ago #
7. 

   crenn
   Moderator

   Fair enough, I don't contribute as much software as some of the users on this forum.

   I can sort of understand their position as it allows users to quickly jump, but I also can definitely understand your position as you spent quite a while cleaning up the spam. Sounds like the tags need to be approved before they're allowed...

   During my semester break next week, I'll try to get the most commonly asked questions and put it into a wiki page as well as a topic here on the forum so that users can quickly and easily find solutions to questions.

   Posted 3 years ago #
8. 

   jessb
   LeafLabs

   gbulmer, we definitely don't want the onus to be on users to keep the tags/forums spam free, and we are definitely super grateful for all the work you guys have put in. As you pointed out, it is basically impossible to remove spam tags in any effective manner -- the only option seems to be to go in and try to delete them all manually from posts, which is a draining-a-well-with-a-thimble-esque task.

   Unfortunately, bbpress doesn't seem to offer a better tool for doing this, such as mass-deleting or banning a particular tag, even for admins. I spend a solid half-hour deleting tags and didn't see the merest dent, so I abandoned the effort. We're hoping that there's a way to manually edit the mysql database to ban tags, but none of us are particularly well-versed in mysql, so it might be a little while before we get this set up. But we're going to keep tags disabled until we figure it out, because it's just not tenable for you or us to delete them manually.

   Hopefully that helps, and hopefully we'll get tags back soon, with a more user-friendly management system. Sorry for all the frustration!

   Posted 3 years ago #

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