General

Yeah, blocking doesn't automatically unfollow them. Gotta click on the house icon at the top of the page.

I realise that sometimes it can be hard see that this website is being updated, because so much of the work we do is on the back end. As admins, we probably don't shout enough about website updates, but then, if it's on the back end it's probably not of that much interest to members. Anyway here goes:


Registration/Account Blocking:

We have spend a temendous amount of time this year on improving the registration validation process, to stop bots and spammers creating accounts. We have over 20 validation checks, written by AI, that automatically block the majority of them.

For those that do manage to create accounts, we have new scripts that check the uploaded content to highlight spammers which we then immediately ban.

We're never going to be able to keep out all spammers on a site like this because we want to make it easy to sign up for genuine members and also protect your privacy. Therefore we haven't gone down the phone verification route. We've also learnt that most of the spammers we get are not bots, but people sat in data centers in the far east who do this for a living.


Member Blocking Feature:

This stops blocked members from contacting you but it doesn't stop them viewing your content. The maxmium number of blocks is 100, which we believe should be plenty on a 'community' website. After all, what would be the point in joining a community site, and then blocking hundreds of members?


Chat:

Chat was completely re-written this year as part of the streaming feature (still in beta), however the visible functionality hasn't changed, so it would be difficult to tell as a user. However, with nice clean chat code we're now in a good position to do a major overhaul of the front end at some point. There's a number of possibilities here, including perhaps building the video streaming into the chat?

Many thanks for the update! Such an update was quite needed 👍

Why don't you release update logs so we can always know what you've done?

The chat has still leak problems, although admitedly since some months now, they're not as bad.

This is true. Although, ideally, there should be 0 leaks.

1) 100 blocks is not NEARLY enough, especially considering...

2) you actively choose to not do anything about people who CONSTANTLY re-delete their accounts *to evade blocking at the outset*

Bots are not the problem. Boundary violators are.

Perhaps you could start a forum page that only you and other mods can post in called, patches and updates, or something, were you post as updates are rolling out and maybe a brief description of what it does, thisway people understand what's going on

Echoing this.
Sorry you all broke chat with that latest update. At least once a day you see someone talking about it. So it is still worse off with leaks on top of it.

I can see the data centers and they have their m.o. yet they are showing up in drones.

Block list definitely should not have a limit regardless of free or premium. You have members who delete their accounts and rejoin the following day using a vpn. Thought those were illegal on the site? They should be instant ban.

I think a lot of people may not fathom the amount of effort it can take. Sometimes, it takes hours, at least due in part to how I don't want to be sloppy and check things out. I'm happy to continue engaging in the effort though, to give back to a community that has given me a lot.

Stopping the scammers who manage to register anyway, is a never ending game of whack-a-mole. And for the most part, it's volunteers who stop them.

There's no set schedule, it's whenever we have a free moment. We do have lives and obligations.

Given we have quite a large, diverse membership, it's pretty much guaranteed that not everyone will like everyone else. However, everyone is expected to get along with everyone else, at least in public. The simple fact of the matter is, there can be user disagreements that aren't covered by the rules. That's just life.

This is why blocks only prevent private messages from that person. However, one small change I may like to see is for the block to prevent comments on one's content (such as pictures) from the blocked person.

I saw one person reply to this thread about other users who are "not respecting boundaries." While it can sometimes be difficult to prove, this is unacceptable behavior under rule #3 (respect others). So please, report this behavior.

A single report is not guaranteed to result in bans, particularly since without evidence provided, it does turn into a "he said, she said" match, and because real users are typically given chances to not repeat this behavior. However, multiple repeated incidents can and do eventually result in bans of varying lengths.

One more thing... if the blocks are being used up because of scammers, please... don't do this.

Don't just block scammers and hope they go away. That just gives them more opportunities to scam others. Report them, and give as much information as you can. If you can provide a link of say, where stolen pictures came from, even better.

If we determine they are scammers, and we often do, rest assured, they will get banned. Scamming is an instant ban offense upon discovery.

However, it's not always feasible to check every single account, which means we rely a great deal on you, the users to point them out.