Dear God...
 

Then let us use PMs, for fuck's sake. How the fuck are we supposed to keep in touch if we can't talk privately to other people?

Hi Admin... Nice place you got here



Where's the bathroom?

They exist??? Oh my God.

Having the PMs sounds nice.

I'm not really up on how harvesting email addresses goes... What's the difference between putting my email address in a thread and putting it in my profile? Is putting it in my profile safer, for some reason?

(This is an honest question, not a dig at anyone anywhere)

Actually there is a difference which can go from slightly better to much better, depending on how desperate are the spams. Many of them rarely look into profiles for emails.

Silly, this is why I keep several email and messenger accounts. The ones I post in public for ordinary use are spam fronts... I have others that only close friends know of. I don't really care how much spam an address I post here gets, unless it's spam to test my adherence to that statement.

But honestly, private messages should be allowed. It was frustrating, being unable to send PMs when I could not register my account, nor tell anyone about it -_- They're good to have for these things.

The admins cut off our means of private communication in order to make it more difficult to organize against them.

There's a good chance that isn't true, of course, but I'll stick to it until I have sufficient reason to believe otherwise.

I think you are correct. They would probably say that it is to protect us; but it is really a conspiracy.

I adblock them. Thank God for Firefox.

Last time I posted something like this it was deleted. Wait for it...

I don't ever press the ads anyway.

Generally speaking, the admins don't ban people who are trying to get banned. They also don't ban people other people are trying to get banned.

That just made me think of the Matrix. The Architect.

Anyway... yeah, the e-mail I posted on here is a decoy. My real e-mail is....
Just kidding. :P

Actually I get quite a bit of spam as it is, but my spam filters seem to be pretty good. I rarely get any spam in my actual inbox.

*sings* Spam, spam spam spam spam spam spam spam spametty-spam!!! Spametty-Spam!!!!
Come on, all ye Monty Python fans!

So you are just trying to be a problem? That's kinda not cool. Abusive people who are here for the sole purpose of causing problems and disruption and drama are the principal reason the PM's are turned off. At least now your selfish antagonistic martyr games are out in the open. The community here has been being moderated fairly effectively lately. Problematic and/or spammy posts are removed before most people notice, most of the time. But you persist in trying to paint a worse picture and that's really not fair to all the people here that actually do use this site for pleasant interactions and exchange of ideas.

We don't think it's a good idea to post your email addresses in threads. This is not an unreasonable view. You will find that this feeling is reflected on a great deal of community boards and sites. You know it's a problem and that's why you encouraged it. That just seems kind of out of line.

So long as you're not talking to them on this board?


There is a big difference between accepting responsiblility for people posting personal information, since obviously it's not wholly in our control, and making an effort to protect them from potential abuse of their personal information, which they have been encouraged to post by people like yourself. The fact simply is that (at) is filtered to read as @ by the email harvesting bots. Has been for a long time. Some people don't know better. Having you here from your other boards or whatever, encouraging people here to post their personal contact info, when it's clearly made not available by the administration of this site on their individual profiles, sounds kind of questionable at the very least. Any reasonable person would see it that way too.

So that is the real issue. We are allowed to speak as long as we speak on this board.

Ever heard of a private conversation? If you gave back the Private Message system people would be able to speak 'on this board'.

You state in the rules that people are free to post their home addresses on your boards, and yet you feel the need to protect your poor innocent users from the nasty nasty Spam Bots. Aww. Isn't that sweet.

If you read my post correctly you would see that I didn't encourage people to post their information with (at) instead of @ to stop email harvesting. I told them that typing out at and dot out would cut down on the chance of having their addresses harvested.

And I resent your implication that I am here from other sites to scalp users of this board. I defy you to show me a single post that I've made that has suggested someone leave this board to join another.

I think you are way too aggro about not getting to collect people's emails and AIM accounts, seriously. You are also calling on people to 'show their distain' for you not being allowed to compromise their information, you are even telling them not to support any of the ads running on this site. That's clearly destructive to this community. We don't charge anyone and we hope to potentially cover costs with some fairly unobtrusive banners.

No dig taken. It's not actually available on your profile either.

I suggest that you start reading what I actually post instead of referring to what you think I said. When I said to show your 'distain' [sic] I was talking about peoples dissatisfaction at the Private Messaging on this site being taken away as expressed in CircleV, Catch and Clockwork's posts.

Let me know when you want to actually talk about something I said instead of just twisting my posts in a poor attempt to make me look like a trouble maker.

Ok, I'll let you know.

You know it's ironic that this thread popped up after my dad (being the good father he is) asked me if this site had moderators. I laughed and actually said yes, because apparently THEY DO EXIST!!! Of course you know, they only seem to pop up when things like this happen, when they supposedly want to protect us from the nasty spammers.

I personally think they don't really care. But whatever.

I'm confused-- I know MINE isn't available, but I just looked at Crying_Crimson_Tears' profile and saw her AIM and Yahoo information. Is it different because it just says her yahoo username, no "@" involved? Does that confuse the spambots, or something?

Don't make it worse for us. Quit talking back. :P


ANYWAYS!

Gnet, I'd REALLY like to know why we can't have personal messages?
Like, I'm perfectly aware of why you don't want us posting them on the actual BOARDS, but if I'd like to attain their MSN, I'd have to send them some sort of message, right?

So... yeah. Know what I'm saying?
I'd really appreciate it. :)

I'm not talking back... buttface. I'm genuinely curious.

Well then SAY IT NICER! :O

I said it nicely. I didn't pepper it with flowery speech, but there was nothing mean or confrontational.

I'm being VERY nice these days.

And Maggz, dahling, you're still a buttface.

Well you're a stupidgallbladder. :P

Maybe I'm just too special for the SpamBots to want to get me. And if the Admins are so worried about the SpamBots getting us then why don't they just get rid of the option to put our addresses and such in our profiles??? What's wrong with it??? And yes, we should have out PMs back.

Don't protect people against their will.

People always have the choice of whether they want to disclose their private information such as email addresses, and why should you stop them? You could always recommend to refrain from giving out email addresses and IM usernames, but in the end you cannot prohibit it. You can't defend the people who don't want to be defended, or at least it is idiocy to do so.

It seems to me that PMs are not the problem... 'abusive people' are the problem. So why not bring back PMs, and focus on reprimanding the people who are being abusive, rather than blanket-ban the whole population from sending a PM?

--SKot

If you don't mind my saying, that's a little overblown. Generally speaking, posting that sort of info when it is appropriate in a thread isn't the end of the world. It's been pointed out that some of that info is even available in individual user profiles and such. However, a thread started by an aggressively negative admin of several other boards to gather the off site contact info for users of this system seems a little off. I mean, she stated that she expected to get banned for it, so it's not a huge shock that such a thread might get closed.

And the reason the PM's are closed has been explained before. It's not a huge secret. Better systems for stopping spam and abuse need to be put into place. We've gotten a better handle on the nokia posting bots on the community boards, with the help of some post reporting and such, but private messages had their own problems. It was our goal to have the system beefed up a while back, but it hasn't really been a top priority. There are other features for the site being worked on that supersede the PMs, and we hope people will like them even better.

Just to clarify, the reason D_T (who is female, but that's not really a big deal) thought she was going to be banned had more to do with THIS thread, rather than the Email Addresses thread. Also, is the reason you closed the thread to protect us, as you originally stated, or because D_T is a moderator on several other forums, a fact she didn't share until after the thread was closed?

I'm really excited to see the new features you're putting in place, and it's nice to see evidence of an active interest by the admins on these boards. I'm sure there are many behind-the-scenes things that aren't visible to us, but we really appreciate you coming in to threads like these and answering our questions.

Thanks for the gender clerification. I fixed my statement. But, the thread smelled like a problem. It just looked like it was there for less than above board reasons, and then a bunch of info surfaces that makes it seem even more like that was the right call. It wasn't closed to protect each and every one of you, it was closed to deny the data collection from the thread poster because it looked fishy. As it turns out, it was kinda fishy.

Honestly, I'm not feeling the love. Every time we respond and actually give a reasoned explanation of an action it just ends up being pages of nonsense negativity and hostility, peppered with the occasional half hearted reasonable thought. Things actually seemed to be most chill when there were no stated moderators and no real administrative discussion. Just quiet removal of spam and truly problematic posts. Then the wannabe Matlock's and expatriots didn't have what to grandstand about.

A couple day old thread with pretty much nothing but a handful of people's emails and aims got deleted. Big deal. But no, there has to be the obligatory attack the administration nonsense. It's just a real drag.

Firstly, 'he' is a she.

Secondly, I stated in the thread that the reason I was starting it was so that we could keep in contact with people that we wanted to talk with over messenger and through email was well as posting here. It is a nice thing to have a private conversation with someone where you don't have the whole message board reading what you are saying. You are making accusations and making assumptions of my motives that are untrue... and are rather close to libel.

Was anyone approached by me to join another Forum?

Thirdly, the comment I made referring to my expectation of being banned or suspended was made in this thread regarding my questioning of the methods of moderating on this site. I did not expect to be banned, suspended or to have the other thread closed because it states in YOUR SITES RULES that the sharing of personal information is a choice left up to the member who wants to share it. Technically the other thread broke no board rules and should not have been closed.

Now, please continue answering the questions posted here because people are wanting to understand why we aren't allowed to have private conversations with each other... but you really need to stop with the false accusations levelled against me.

How would I know? Isn't that the point of a private conversation? People not having visiblility to what you are talking about? But, I never stated that you were approaching people to join another forum. I just said it seemed odd that a moderator of several other gothic forums would be so bent on collecting private contact info of people participating here and then get so cranky when their thread got moderated. Then, on top of that, use it as a reason to make snide threads like ' Dear God, The Admin DOES Exist!' What exactly are we supposed to think of that?

I mean, personally, my view is that this community is for community interaction. It's not MySpace, and it's not like the MySpace thread had been deleted. PM's might be nice, but it's just not a feature we feel particularly strongly about. We're working on upgrading them, but really this board is built for public communication, first and formost. It's not for sending secret love notes and it's not for gathering personal data. Threads for you to just grab people's info have kind of very little value to the general reader and participant. And yeah, seeing that many people unwittingly feeding the email collectors their personal info, thinking they were protecting themselves with their clever {at} and {dot} just kind of offended my sensibilities. Hard to say if that's reasonable or not, but there it is.

...I have an idea! If you're gonna post your email address/screen name, make an image with your email address on it. The email harvesters won't pick it up because they only scan text as far as I know....if they're onto images now, lock up your daughters, the spammers are taking hold! -panic-

Hello.

Do you care to introduce yourself, newbling?

:)

This (<- Link) would be the appropriate place to do it.

You might have seen the image based verification/authentication code that the registration process requires you to input, along with it's oddball font, graphical noise and crisscross lines and such. Well, given that the spam bots do still manage to get through, well, yes... They do actually have the tech to read it off graphics these days. But, then again, that's really kind of beside the point.

That's what I was thinking. I wonder why the Admin would think that. (if they even do)

You know, we can stop people from PMing us by using the specially-created "ignore" feature. PMs from someone on your ignore list are not received. That completely nulls your suggestion that the main reason for disabling PM's is "harrassment".

Also aside from Om3ga, pray tell who you believe is going to immediately start e-ráping people via PM?

You're either very naive or you have hidden agendas here.

I don't wish to embroil myself in this somewhat silly debate, but I do participate in a few forums that use the exact same technology, and in every other case, PM's are enabled. I was rather surprised to find that they were not here. What's more, if I get harassed on any other board, I toss the user on my ignore list, and that's the end of it.

Not that I really care if PM's are on or off, so long as there exists a facility somewhere where we can exchange IM information, I'm happy.

I totally agree that it should be our choice as to whether we'd like to talk "outside" of message boards.

It's happened before, or come close to. I was only half-kidding-- the Admin has done some, ah... irrational things in the past.

Yeah, I forgot. Sorry.