Somehow a bot got in

[Doreen Peri]

There were 4 spam posts in this Discussions forum. I don’t know how it got in. They are very sophisticated these days.

I deleted the user and deleted the posts.

If it happens again, I will have to close registration again. The way it’s set up now is that people can register but I have to manually activate their account. Obviously that didn’t work.

Carry on. Enjoy. If you see spam posts, if you could please email me or send me a private message, I’ll get rid of them as soon as I can and close the registration.

Thanks

[sasha]

Thanks, Doreen. I've come to rely on this site as my equivalent of the friendly neighborhood bar. I saw one of them here yesterday, hawking some kind of energy drink. When I got the 403 error a little later, I figured you were cleaning house. The 'bots are everywhere now - foot soldiers of the AI apocalypse?

[Doreen Peri]

I didn’t know about the 403 error message. Thanks for telling me. I should just go ahead and turn the registration off.

Years ago we had a custom spam bot killer… my son wrote the code. It was a different math problem every time someone tried to register. It worked great! Then something happened that caused the software to need to be reinstalled. None of our custom changes were included unfortunately and by that time my son was unavailable. You should have seen this place back then! It was beautiful! We had a rotating banners show. Every time you clicked or refreshed or posted, a new art banner would appear at the top of the page.

I have small images of those banners posted somewhere on here. They are so beautiful.

Anyway, I should stop the registration.

Maybe I’ll email some old members and invite them back.

[sasha]

The 403 Error is a sporadic issue I've run into here for a while now. I ran into it a week or two ago, until a little notification popped up in the corner of my screen informing me that my VPN was back on - I hadn't known it was off. Once re-engaged, I was able to access the site. ChatGPT (that deranged micro-savant) confirmed that loss of VPN was one possible cause. I got the error this morning even though it was on - but a cold reboot seemed to fix things. Then it came back, and a warm restart was enough. Sometimes all it takes is a walk up to the lake & back. I assumed this morning it was you just locking up until you could mop the floors, but it seems now there's something about the electronic weather at your end vs that at mine causing it - I don't hear of anyone else having the problem. As long as its transient, I suppose I can live with it.

Anyway - I'm glad that you're here curating the site for us. I've come to see it as a creative sanctuary.