Apologies for the lack of posting recently. For the last month or so, I’ve been chasing spam on the site, which has dampened some of my enthusiasm for creating new content – every time I came here I had to spend time deleting a bunch of accounts. It’s manual spam – people create an account and then manually add content. There’s no captcha to deal with this, as a real person is adding the spam. I am now more sick of Ugg boots than I’ve ever been.
I tried 5 different plugins and none of them worked. Lo and behold, I finally found one yesterday (after manipulating some code on the backend). So now the spam problem is curbed because I can moderate members before they go live.
I also deleted all of the spam groups that were formed under these accounts – so groups and forums are clean again. Hopefully they get more active again.
Anyway, this has been a headache for a while now, right at a time when interest in self-publishing is exploding. So very glad to be able to concentrate again on what matters.
For anyone interested in Buddypress, these plugins are helpful:
Get an Editorial Review | Get Amazon Sales & Reviews | Get Edited | Get Beta Readers | Enter the SPR Book Awards | Other Marketing Services
Henry, I certainly appreciate what you’ve done. And I also lament that you had to put in so much time and work to get rid of those insane spammers. Is this the price people have to pay when their websights become popular? Of course, there was no way to let the spammers know that most of the members of and visitors to the SPR aren’t saving their hard-earned money for the idiotic products I noticed were for sale, but for editing and marketing their literary dreams. Thanks again, Henry.
I’ve thought, off and on, about becoming a member, but noticed that the quality of the posts was going down. And looking at the groups and forums, I thought “Why bother?” I’d been very impressed when I first came across the site, but didn’t realize it was a one-man operation. I can appreciate the difficulty of maintaining the quality.
Thanks. It’s not totally a one-man operation. There are other editors and reviewers out there. But it’s up to me to deal with this backend stuff.