[Jordan~]

It's also about posts appearing on search engines. All the search engines have bots in residence here that just report URLs back to the search engines, so they can analyse them and include them in search results. We can ban bots universally, but that wouldn't do anything unless we also restricted read permissions for guests: the bots could just come as unregistered guests and read The Fray anyway. The only way to stop posts from appearing in search engines that I'm fairly certain would work is by removing the read permissions of both bots and guests - we're only talking about The Fray, I presume, because it's sort of the 'private' forum, where we talk about ourselves and each other more than anything else. It's possible, but I have no idea if it would work, that we could individually ban the search engine bots (or just restrict their permissions so people can still find the forum on Google), but I suspect they'd just send different bots. Or rather, different bots would find us as they crawled their way through the web.

I understand the concern about 'private' posts appearing on search engines, I'm just not sure that there's anything we can do at all that would protect their privacy fully. If someone finds out something about you you'd rather they didn't know when they see something you posted here on Google, they could have found it out incidentally by registering had it not been on Google, anyway. Plus, this is all fairly anonymous if you want it to be - a lot of us know each other, have met each other, are Facebook friends, etc., but a lot of us are anonymous strangers to each other, too. Really, the only people who can actually find out who you are are we the moderators, because we can whois your IP address, but the information you can get from that is still normally pretty limited and we're supposed to be responsible enough not to abuse that power.

[Ann]

If this is all about what one non-member who can read about himself, then it would be awful to exclude all the innocent people who would, otherwise, gain a great deal from reading before registering. I am/was one of those people.

Thank you.

I don't think this is all about that at all. Sadie brought it up her discomfort about her posts potentially showing up in search engines (which Jordan addresses). Anything about Scherado was either meant goofily or as a sort of secondary possible benefit to a non-public off-topic forum.

But, as we can see, people aren't too keen on the idea. Thanks for your input guys! I tend to agree with the majority here. My hope is that this place remains welcoming and I don't want to make it more difficult for would be members to lurk for years upon years before deciding to join.

[milkisobel]

i'm really upset with newcomers who think they can cowboying here, i really like the fray to be close of the "under 100post members" as regular fromamouth basis, i don't understand why mods and or non bold persons regularly have to explain themselves to other again and again, i feel some bad craziness here that reminds me the begining of the fuck-i-forgot-his-bastard-name area, and it really piss me off!!!

[Weirdelves]

Just to explain to anyone wondering where the user Mishu has gone, and to keep fellow Tadpoles abreast -

The user 'Mishu' was, it turns out, Scherado trying to pull the wool over our eyes once more. He had registered with the same email address as on his Relayor and Schera-do accounts. He's been banned in every possible way from the forum, and let's hope this is the last we see of him. He's just a troll, after all.

If anyone desperately needs to know more about the situation, please PM me or one of the other moderators and we can explain what demanded such extreme action.

We know there's been a lot of unrest on the forum recently, but hopefully now there's no easy way for Scherado to return and we can all settle back down to our normal peaceful selves. Please help us by keeping the peace, and bringing up any problems / issues directly with moderators instead of clogging up the forums.

Thanks

[polliwog]

But what about the accusation made a while back that sherado and I are one and the same? How do you know it isn't true? IP addresses can be faked, and new email addresses can be obtained. Or what about the possibility that the people who made the accusation are actually scherado, and that the same may hold true for those who claimed that I was just as disruptive. You know who you are. I hereby formally request a major investigation conducted by unbiased personnel from a major university, like MIT, Harvard, Oxford or Cambridge, with appropriate security clearances verified by NSA of MI5.

[polliwog]

Ok, if not MIT, Harvard, Oxford or Cambridge, then how about Hogwarts judged by Hagrid, Professor McGonagall and The Fat Lady from the painting guarding the entrance to the House of Gryffindor?

[milkisobel]

add snape and i'm ok, you know for the unlawed dirt job, like poisening people in dark room etc...

[polliwog]

ok, snape, too! So, when is the trial?

[Jessie]

Love me some Snape!

[polliwog]

Snape was one of the true heroes of the story!

[Weirdelves]

First and last mentions of Snape in HP

[milkisobel]

nice!

[polliwog]

I want to report that one of the moderators has posted non-JN related material in a thread in the Right On section of the forum.

[milkisobel]

[Weirdelves]

[polliwog]

What's up with the forum? I just recently had to change the link I use to get here, and now I have to log in each time, even when I click that I want to be logged in automatically.

[dwaink]

think they changed something; to deal with bots? i just had to log in and remind my browser to relog me each time

[Steve]

I've not been able to "log in each time" ever since the site moved across from the "old" MilkyMoon a few years ago. It is annoying though. Also, I think one of my recent posts has mysteriously disappeared. Something odd is happening...

[stunning-sky]

I've never been able to do the log in automatically thing either.

[Jordan~]

We didn't change anything - or I didn't, anyway. It might have been a hardware thing server-side - I noticed the disappearance of a few posts.