The Future of this Forum?

[Admin]

Hi all,

I'm considering shutting down this forum. The constant barrage of spam and technical problems is more than I have time for.

If anyone with experience with phpBB wants to step up and take over administration of this forum, I'd be happy to discuss via email.

Please let me know your thoughts/concerns. Thanks.

[jhatch]

Don't Do it James! I really enjoy this forum and especially like learning about how Corel is the real deal program to use. My favorite post of all time.

[Mike A]

I don't visit often, but I guess my visit today was timely. I really appreciate the existence of this forum - and the main site. Thanks for all your work todate. For info and chat on tech illustration, I really don't know of any other location on the web that comes close. I hope you can find some way to keep it open.

[matt_lorenzi]

What are some of the technical problems you are having? I would like to see more discussion and more threads. As you can tell I've been trying to get things going, with no bites. Do you require a moderator? I would/could be up to the task. Are there a lot of bot postings? I've learned that a healthy forum requires commitment by the owner, but also of the users. User will volunteer to flag, moderate, and look out for spam.

This is a great resource and should be kept, but as mentioned, if people are only visiting and not posting then it hard to monitor.

Feel free to email me...
Matt

[JamesProvost]

Thanks for the response guys. I'll stick with it, I was just frustrated.

The main problem I'm having is 10-15 spam accounts registered per day. I have a CAPTCHA in place so they must be using real people, rather than bots, to register the accounts. Thus I have to look at each username and email address and guess which ones are spam. Usually googling the email addresses brings up spam user databases, so it's not actually that hard. It's just persistent and annoying.

A secondary problem is that these 10-15 registration emails per day steal my attention away from more important things, like work, writing on the blog and posting here. So I tried changing the email address where these notifications are sent, so I could more easily ignore them and do it on a weekly basis rather than intermittently. I must have broken something, as now I'm not receiving these notifications anywhere. Problem solved, kind of, but it might be nice to allow legitimate users to register eventually.

So Matt, I appreciate the offer and may follow up with you shortly, but first I'll have to fix the account moderation.

This would be so much easier if Corel made a forum

[clint]

Yea we kind of need this forum as annoying as all the fake accounts are. Sorry I haven't been more helpful with that, it's hard to keep up with and figure out what's real and what's not. Maybe we need an incentive for someone to take that job over. Want my old intuos 2 platinum?

[Stevenwhoward]

I agree, though there may be some frustrations with the fake accounts, keeping this forum helps out a lot. My college was great for fundamental Illustration basics, but this site and the forum together have helped me prepare and are a great reference and resource for entering into the professional world of Technical Illustration.