Squeaky Clean
Posted: Sun Aug 27, 2023 8:05 pm
It is done. The Wongery forum is clear of spam.
Well, okay, this was actually true three days ago, but as usual it's taken me far too long to get a post written. Or, for that matter, to get much of anything done. I said in the last blog post that I was feeling recharged and might get more done over the next few weeks... and then almost three weeks passed without my posting anything to the Wongery, either blog posts or articles. To be fair, part of that is that I was working on a different project that was taking a lot of time; the Wongery may be perhaps the project that has the most personal importance to me and that I would choose if I had for some reason to select only one project to focus all my time on, but it's not the only project I'm working on.
But anyway. The Wongery forum is clear of spam. This is not the first time it's been clear of spam posts. I've cleared out all the spam posts before. It takes longer than I should, because I do feel the need to at least glance at each post to make sure it's not legitimate (or at least to glance at the subject line and the name of the poster, and then, if the subject line doesn't look like obvious spam and the name of the poster isn't spammer-typical procedurally generated nonsense, I look at the post itself), but I've done it. But it didn't stay clear, because new spam posts kept coming in. Not because new spammers were registering—the anti-spam measures I (belatedly) implemented seem to have worked to stem the deluge of spammers, and there have been no new registrations since then.
But I hadn't deleted all the spammer accounts that had registered before I put those measures into place. Why not? Well, because, just as I felt the need to check the posts before deleting them to make sure they were legitimate, I also felt the need to check the accounts to make sure they weren't real (potential) posters. Any accounts that included spam links or gibberish lists of occupations or interest in the profiles, had e-mail addresses with lots of periods or other suspicious signs, or had clearly procedurally generated names I went ahead and cleared out, but if in doubt I left them in place. So this meant that clearing out the spammer accounts was a time-consuming process, but finally it is done. I suspect the vast majority of the 154 accounts I left in place (not counting the accounts belonging to the "WikiSysop" and the Grandmaster Wongers) were indeed automatically generated, especially the accounts with single dictionary words as names ("trust", "drone", "new", "cockerel", "groin", etc.) But, well, they had e-mail addresses that didn't look obviously fake and didn't have any links or nonsense in their profiles, and I preferred to err on the side of permissibility. In any case, none of these accounts have made any spam posts in the last few days, and if they do, I'll delete them then.
(Why did I feel the need to check every post and account? Since the Wongery hasn't had its hard launch yet and nobody knows about it, what are the chances that any nonspammer (besides me) has actually registered on the forum? Negligible, admittedly, but if I hadn't checked I still would have been haunted by the possibility that I had unjustly deleted a well-meaning posts. I am not necessarily a psychologically well person.)
Now, we'll see whether after the hard launch the forum attracts any legitimate posts, or whether it remains an empty wasteland where the only posts are me nattering inanely to myself. I certainly hope that after the hard launch the site gets visitors and many people start posting in the forum, but... well, like I said, we'll see.
After clearing out the forum, I also decided I may as well go ahead and set up some social media accounts to the forum. As I said before, the Wongery had a Twitter account linked on the front page, but I went ahead and removed that for obvious reasons. Still, I figured it may be a good idea to have some social media presence (besides Tumblr); I'm not touching Threads or Bluesky with a ten-foot pole, but I set up and linked Wongery accounts on cohost and Mastodon, although I haven't posted yet on either, and don't plan to until after the hard launch. (Well... I couldn't post on cohost right now even if I wanted to, since there's a waiting period for new accounts to be activated before they can post, and I'm still in the waiting period right now. According to my settings page, there are currently 6,426 people in front of me.)
It took me a lot longer to make the Mastodon account than the cohost account, not because the process was any more difficult, but because of decision paralysis (an affliction to which I am, alas, frequently susceptible). When creating a Mastodon account, you have to choose what specific Mastodon server to create it on, and I spent more time than I probably should have skimming through lists of servers. I even considered creating a new Mastodon server for the Wongery, but this seemed like it would be a difficult process (at least for someone as nontechnical as myself), and on review I'm not even sure it's possible with my current webhosting plan. Anyway, I guess accounts can be migrated between servers later, so while creating a Wongery Mastodon server isn't off the table for the future, I went ahead and created a Wongery account on an existing server at least for now. On two existing servers, in fact, since I first created one on a server called cr8r.gg that was billed as "[a] community for all types of creators (and those who consume the creations)", since that seemed right in line with the Wongery's raison d'être, but then I kind of second-guessed myself and thought maybe just for name recognition purposes it would be better to have an account on the original and best-known server, mastodon.social. So now I have both, and I'm not sure which one I'm going to use (though at least for now it's the latter that's linked from the Wongery front page). Maybe I'll use both for different things. I don't know. I have four months to figure it out.
So anyway, that's some of the progress I've made on the Wongery lately. Although, while these things aren't completely unimportant, as I keep saying I really need to get back to making some progress posting new articles, too. So, uh, yeah; I'll get on that.
Well, okay, this was actually true three days ago, but as usual it's taken me far too long to get a post written. Or, for that matter, to get much of anything done. I said in the last blog post that I was feeling recharged and might get more done over the next few weeks... and then almost three weeks passed without my posting anything to the Wongery, either blog posts or articles. To be fair, part of that is that I was working on a different project that was taking a lot of time; the Wongery may be perhaps the project that has the most personal importance to me and that I would choose if I had for some reason to select only one project to focus all my time on, but it's not the only project I'm working on.
But anyway. The Wongery forum is clear of spam. This is not the first time it's been clear of spam posts. I've cleared out all the spam posts before. It takes longer than I should, because I do feel the need to at least glance at each post to make sure it's not legitimate (or at least to glance at the subject line and the name of the poster, and then, if the subject line doesn't look like obvious spam and the name of the poster isn't spammer-typical procedurally generated nonsense, I look at the post itself), but I've done it. But it didn't stay clear, because new spam posts kept coming in. Not because new spammers were registering—the anti-spam measures I (belatedly) implemented seem to have worked to stem the deluge of spammers, and there have been no new registrations since then.
But I hadn't deleted all the spammer accounts that had registered before I put those measures into place. Why not? Well, because, just as I felt the need to check the posts before deleting them to make sure they were legitimate, I also felt the need to check the accounts to make sure they weren't real (potential) posters. Any accounts that included spam links or gibberish lists of occupations or interest in the profiles, had e-mail addresses with lots of periods or other suspicious signs, or had clearly procedurally generated names I went ahead and cleared out, but if in doubt I left them in place. So this meant that clearing out the spammer accounts was a time-consuming process, but finally it is done. I suspect the vast majority of the 154 accounts I left in place (not counting the accounts belonging to the "WikiSysop" and the Grandmaster Wongers) were indeed automatically generated, especially the accounts with single dictionary words as names ("trust", "drone", "new", "cockerel", "groin", etc.) But, well, they had e-mail addresses that didn't look obviously fake and didn't have any links or nonsense in their profiles, and I preferred to err on the side of permissibility. In any case, none of these accounts have made any spam posts in the last few days, and if they do, I'll delete them then.
(Why did I feel the need to check every post and account? Since the Wongery hasn't had its hard launch yet and nobody knows about it, what are the chances that any nonspammer (besides me) has actually registered on the forum? Negligible, admittedly, but if I hadn't checked I still would have been haunted by the possibility that I had unjustly deleted a well-meaning posts. I am not necessarily a psychologically well person.)
Now, we'll see whether after the hard launch the forum attracts any legitimate posts, or whether it remains an empty wasteland where the only posts are me nattering inanely to myself. I certainly hope that after the hard launch the site gets visitors and many people start posting in the forum, but... well, like I said, we'll see.
After clearing out the forum, I also decided I may as well go ahead and set up some social media accounts to the forum. As I said before, the Wongery had a Twitter account linked on the front page, but I went ahead and removed that for obvious reasons. Still, I figured it may be a good idea to have some social media presence (besides Tumblr); I'm not touching Threads or Bluesky with a ten-foot pole, but I set up and linked Wongery accounts on cohost and Mastodon, although I haven't posted yet on either, and don't plan to until after the hard launch. (Well... I couldn't post on cohost right now even if I wanted to, since there's a waiting period for new accounts to be activated before they can post, and I'm still in the waiting period right now. According to my settings page, there are currently 6,426 people in front of me.)
It took me a lot longer to make the Mastodon account than the cohost account, not because the process was any more difficult, but because of decision paralysis (an affliction to which I am, alas, frequently susceptible). When creating a Mastodon account, you have to choose what specific Mastodon server to create it on, and I spent more time than I probably should have skimming through lists of servers. I even considered creating a new Mastodon server for the Wongery, but this seemed like it would be a difficult process (at least for someone as nontechnical as myself), and on review I'm not even sure it's possible with my current webhosting plan. Anyway, I guess accounts can be migrated between servers later, so while creating a Wongery Mastodon server isn't off the table for the future, I went ahead and created a Wongery account on an existing server at least for now. On two existing servers, in fact, since I first created one on a server called cr8r.gg that was billed as "[a] community for all types of creators (and those who consume the creations)", since that seemed right in line with the Wongery's raison d'être, but then I kind of second-guessed myself and thought maybe just for name recognition purposes it would be better to have an account on the original and best-known server, mastodon.social. So now I have both, and I'm not sure which one I'm going to use (though at least for now it's the latter that's linked from the Wongery front page). Maybe I'll use both for different things. I don't know. I have four months to figure it out.
So anyway, that's some of the progress I've made on the Wongery lately. Although, while these things aren't completely unimportant, as I keep saying I really need to get back to making some progress posting new articles, too. So, uh, yeah; I'll get on that.