[UCIMC-Tech] Friggin' Spam Filter, etc

[Chris Ritzo]

These are all real issues to work through, Mike. I put together an initial
meeting to look at next steps and plans for overhauling the website and its
features a couple months ago, but I'm afraid that someone else will need to
take over that organizing for me now. Happy to help as needed with
tech/hosting questions or issues, but I'm in the middle of too many
personal changes right now to continue leading the charge.


On Thu, Mar 28, 2013 at 10:25 AM, Mike Lehman <rebelmike at earthlink.net>wrote:

> Well, I will say that the spam filter is doing a great job of keeping spam
> out from what can be seen.
>
> On the other hand, in simply managing a number of housekeeping tasks, I've
> found it pretty irritating. In fact, maybe we should re-term it the
> "publishing filter," because from my experience it seems to spend a lot of
> time preventing legitimate usage of the site.
>
> Right now, I used Norman Solomon's great piece on Bob McChesney's new book
> for the daily test feed. There's a great commentary by Free Press's Craig
> Aaron that goes with it, sort of, but trying to post it as a Comment tells
> me it's triggered the spam filter. Didn't seem appropriate to roll it in
> with the article itself and doesn't seem right to add it as another article
> when we only have three stories visible on the main page for non-Local news
> anyway (another issue I find baffling, given no one ever documented why
> that change was made, as well as Comments disappearing.).
>
> And it seems ridiculous to have the spam filter enabled for logged in
> users in the first place. We've had virtually no problems ever with
> registered users from the beginning of the site. If we ever do, that's what
> editors are for. Maybe it's an architecture issue that can't be fixed? In
> any case, the machine is telling humans what to do, instead of the other
> way around it should be.
>
> Don't mean to dump water on anything, but I will agree with Chris's
> assessment that the site is working better in terms of security, but I
> think we need to keep in mind that in terms of making it friendly to folks
> to publish, it's been a serious retrograde. View counts tell some of the
> story of this decline. In fact, no one can even register as a new user
> right now. Even assuming we make a decision to drop open publishing (and I
> presume drop our status as an IMC), I assume we still want people to use
> the site. But making a decision to not allow new users, which is what we've
> effectively done -- if not officially, means we want to tell citizen
> journalists to go somewhere else to publish...and it shows.
>
> I know there was some talk about a meeting to discuss these and other
> subjects. so I'm hoping we'll get to that soon and maybe get some of the
> easier issues sorted out, because we're letting our political-journalistic
> capital trickle away while things are in Limbo like this.
> Mike Lehman
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