Blur Busters Forums

Just an observation and somewhat a critique. Compared to many other forums, this one appears to have a long delay on submitted posts showing up.

I also realized that when I did a very minor edit of my post once it finally showed up, adding a three "word" 250fps stat, the whole post got temporarily removed instead of the unedited version remaining in the list of recent posts. It's also gone from my control panel/post history. Now that post edit is waiting another long turnaround as if I had just submitted it for the first time. At least the unedited version could have remained in the list of recent posts.

Compared to most forums, this is glacial speed. You can get something shipped almost as fast. Maybe because it's a small community or the chief blurbuster goes over every post personally idk but it's a little inconvenient.

Idk if I would have been better off just replying to my own post with the whole edited post again or if it is the same submission delay. Regardless it's a little frustrating like back to dialup bbs days.

Love the site itself, it's a wealth of knowledge with plenty of charts and graphics and archived info I've been referencing for years.

elvn wrote: ↑

18 Oct 2022, 15:48

There's only a handful of us moderating new users (and on a completely volunteer basis, at that), and it's manual for your first few posts, including edits. After that, it's instant unless you're flagged by a user or moderator for any inappropriate behavior.

The alternative is the forum being flooded with automatic spam bot posts, which we get a surprising amount of without the manual moderation method in place.

jorimt wrote: ↑

18 Oct 2022, 19:10

The alternative is the forum being flooded with automatic spam bot posts, which we get a surprising amount of without the manual moderation method in place.

And not just that -- people who try to post here talking about cars or lawnmowers. I don't know if they were AI spambots or if they registered for the wrong forum, so we usually deny those "ultra-confusing" first posts.

Or immediately start a "bully post" full of vicious violence and curse words (e.g. ranting about esports illegitimacy), or USA-politics-style posts (worse than PC-vs-Mac argument in a Post #1 Tirade/Rant). We also deny those & delete those forum members in a zero-notification manner.

Readers -- some of the spambots now use GPT-3 AI text generation engines. Those advanced bots pretend to post something legitimate about computer stuff, as AI-based rewrites of existing posts elsewhere -- but I still see through these. It's annoying.

Until we upgrade to an advanced AI-based forum-post-approver system, we're still sticking to manual-approve system for the first few posts. Word blacklists doesn't work anymore these days, and we don't blacklist much -- people are allowed to use cursewords lightly in their posts on our system ("My computer is shitty" and things like that) -- so we don't want to blacklist much. So we would need a context-sensitive AI-based filter to remove the manual system. I'm keeping an eye on AI-based filter plugins...

But for now, manual-approves is used for first few posts.

elvn wrote: ↑

18 Oct 2022, 15:48

Just an observation and somewhat a critique. Compared to many other forums, this one appears to have a long delay on submitted posts showing up.

It's just a manual post-approve process for the first few posts;

After a few posts, and a clean posting record (no spam or rule violations), forum members get instant posting priveleges automatically by the system.

We've had huge numbers of spammers and hackers try to hit this forum (plus a few persistent bullying rule-breakers), successfully bypassing spam filters, so we're firewalled + we have strong filter + we have manual filtering for the first 3 posts.

But after a while, the forum recognizes you and your posting becomes instant. Usually you'll notice your 4th post (approximately) behaves normally like just any forum. We may change systems in the future, but due to the highly specialized nature of Blur Busters, we're trying to keep undesirable users to a minimum. Especially because the pandemic caused these forums to degrade somewhat with larger numbers of people going online; so we're trying to keep these forums as high quality as possible by keeping the new-member bar much higher than the average forum.

There are many forums (including an emulation forum I frequent) that does manual-approves for the first 1 or 2 posts, so we're not the only forum that has a new-user manual-approve system on top of existing spam filters, etc. Even when I forgot about it years later, and re-registered as a new member, I had to go through the process again.

I bet many small-time niche forums still do. Like a random emulation forum, or a fan forum about a specific car/bike model. But I don't notice because I've been registered on for 10 years still has a manual first-post-approve system, and that I've totally forgotten about it because I never encounter the manual-approve system anymore.

This system will automatically insta-approve your posts & edits instantly after probably 1-2 more posts of yours.

Keep posting please. I remember you from other forums and like your posts!