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Bug 361893

Summary:

Forum software makes me look like a spammer

Product:

Community

Reporter:

Eike Stepper <stepper>

Component:

Forums and Newsgroups

Assignee:

Forums and Newsgroups inbox <forums-inbox>

Status:

RESOLVED FIXED

QA Contact:

Severity:

blocker

Priority:

CC:

caniszczyk, matthias.sohn, webmaster

Version:

unspecified

Target Milestone:

---

Hardware:

OS:

Windows 7

Whiteboard:

Attachments:

Description	Flags
Screenshot of newsgroup in my Thunderbird	none
Screenshot of forum overview with 27 copies of my post	none
Screenshot of forum post with ugly HTML tags	none

Description Eike Stepper

2011-10-25 04:28:21 EDT

Created attachment 205886 [details]
Screenshot of newsgroup in my Thunderbird

Since ancient times I'm using a good NNTP news client (Thunderbird these days) and that has always been unproblematic for everybody.

Some days ago I've posted a question to the EGit newsgroup (titled "Cloning job gets stuck"). See the first screenshot I'm attaching. I usually put some effort in explaining my problems so I inserted an image into that post.

Now I got an angry reply from that group:

   "Are you trying to spam this forum?
    Why do you post 27 copies of the same question?
    Also your post contains quite a number of HTML tags I don't like to parse."

I felt offended but then I remembered that there is this odd web forum that I NEVER use and I went there ( http://www.eclipse.org/forums/index.php?t=thread&frm_id=48 ) and in fact I found out that my 3 DIFFERENT posts have been multiplied by 9 (!) each (!), ending up with 27 posts with the same title. Well, actually I didn't read those 27 posts completely. Maybe only my first post (of the three different posts) has been copied 27 times. I don't know.

And in fact each of the 27 posts on the web forum contains ugly HTML tags that haven't been filtered out properly: http://www.eclipse.org/forums/index.php/t/247378/

I'm going to attach two more screenshots of the web forum state.

And I'm marking this zilla as a blocker because I think (at least I hope!) the underlying problem that the forum software is mad is the reason that for 9 days I got no reply at all from the EGit team. And the problem that I originally reported there is one that preents my whole team (of eclipse committers) from being able to do their work.

Comment 1 Eike Stepper

2011-10-25 04:28:54 EDT

Created attachment 205887 [details]
Screenshot of forum overview with 27 copies of my post

Comment 2 Eike Stepper

2011-10-25 04:29:19 EDT

Created attachment 205888 [details]
Screenshot of forum post with ugly HTML tags

Comment 3 Matthias Sohn

2011-10-26 09:42:00 EDT

Eike: This got worse with your latest post which displays a gazillion of "phantom" copies filling up the first 16 !! pages of the web forum. 

Could you please stop using your NNTP news client for questions to the EGit forum until this problem is fixed ? Otherwise this renders the web forum completely unusable.

If you don't like to use the web forum you may instead post your questions on the egit-dev list.

Comment 4 Eike Stepper

2011-10-26 11:14:28 EDT

Oh my goodness, I can see it. I thought that might be related with posting in HTML and didn't do that anymore.

Sure, I stop posting to your forum until the webmasters find out what happens and fix that.

BTW. I'm posting to the EMF newsgroup at least 20 times per day in the same way and never I've heard about this kind of problem. At least not to this degree.

Comment 5 Denis Roy

2011-10-26 11:25:40 EDT

"Forum software makes me look like a spammer"

"Problem seems limited to what Eike is doing"

"Conclusion: Eike is a spammer"

I can see two solutions:

1. Somehow fix forum
2. Ban Eike  :-)

















Ah well, I'll investigate solution #1

Comment 6 Eike Stepper

2011-10-26 11:38:42 EDT

> 1. Somehow fix forum
> 2. Ban Eike  :-)

+1 for this order :P

Comment 7 Eric Rizzo

2011-10-26 13:51:16 EDT

*** Bug 362117 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

Comment 8 Denis Roy

2011-10-26 15:06:56 EDT

I've removed all the spam posts and rebuilt the forum indexes.

Now to try and resolve the issue.


I still think banning Eike is a valid solution  ;)

Comment 9 Matthias Sohn

2011-10-26 18:29:31 EDT

(In reply to comment #8)
> I've removed all the spam posts and rebuilt the forum indexes.

thanks, the web forum is back to a usable state

Comment 10 Eike Stepper

2011-10-28 05:11:40 EDT

I'd like to try again whether I can safely post now. When is a good time to do so, i.e. when will webmasters be able to fix possible mess quickly?

Comment 11 Denis Roy

2011-10-28 09:23:32 EDT

Now is a great time.

Comment 12 Eike Stepper

2012-01-13 13:20:37 EST

I haven't heard of someone complaining for a while ;-)