Hi - Tim from Jethro here, sorry to hijack rlp for a technical thing, but I guess rlp has already started that with the previous post about this site.
First I want to thank all the rlp readers who have been commenting, and emailing Gordon with ideas. We are reviewing them all and who knows something may be just what we need! Keep them coming.
As Gordon mentioned this site is built on Drupal. Unfortunately a very old version - we hope just "young" enough that we can upgrade it. Drupal has some fantastic spam control in new versions so while we appreciate comments about fixing the spam problem, that is mostly in hand. The real issue is what to do about the existing comments.
We really don't want to just delete them all, though that is our fall back position. The rlp community obviously values the comments for the continued conversations sparked by rlp writing. There are some techie ways we can try and delete just the spam comments (involving mySQL and PHP queries) but we are not sure that we can make that work entirely successfully.
I want to throw an idea to you. It's crazy enough that rlp might have thought of it himself, though the credit falls to me.
I know there’s 3,000 odd of you readers on any given day, and there's over 1,000 of you who have created user accounts. The way I figure it is if even half of those people, say 500, could delete 100 spam comments each they would all be gone.
So here’s the plan.
If you want to help, and that’s a big if, only if you can spare maybe half an hour of your time, then create an account and add a comment here with your user name (or existing user name) offering to help.
I will give you access to delete comments, and some easy instructions. As a bonus, you will gain access to the rlp subscription area for a period as well. You will be known as the "rlp antispam squad".
If you want to go nuts, I will even ask the preacher to formally recognize the person who deletes the most spam comments.
Thanks for helping - and being part of this community. Personally, I see this like sweeping up the playground in your street after vandals have trashed it. That’s what a community does.
Peace.
Tim
