The BadgerBlog

This week we made a big decision at BW: to go to login-only, meaning only registered and signed-in members can read. I say “we” because I gathered opinions first, and got over 90% approval for the scheme. One worry people had, though, was about the system we have of approving sign-ups. How did we know who the people were? What if people wanted to sign up and couldn’t? So I thought this was a good time for explaining what happens.

There are two people with admin access at BW - me and Biscuit. We both get an email when someone new registers, and then one of us checks the profile to make sure they’re not a spammer. Spammers are getting more persistent and more clever; I only let one through once, but before I’d noticed, five minutes later, they’d already started half a dozen threads. As you can imagine, it would be disasterous to let spammers sign up and so we have to be quite rigorous.

The first step is checking the email address. Does it sound like a real one? Spammers often use nonsense strings of letters and these can be ruled out straight away. Then the domain needs to be checked - there is a blanket ban on .ru domains (which is sadly discrimatory to our friends in the former USSR, but them’s the breaks), and .biz, as nobody genuine has ever used them to sign up with. This can trip us up sometimes, especially when people use yahoo.com or geocities.com addresses, as the sheer number of people with these addresses mean they have had to choose a vaguely nonsensical name. If this happens, though, a brief email to me will put it straight.

If the email address gives no clues, the rest of the profile helps. Giving your interests as ’sex’, for example, might win you friends on Craigslist personals, but it tells me you’re just going to try and post porn links. And if your homepage is called “www.viagra-vioxxxxx-c1al1s.biz.com” then sorry, buddy, you’re out of luck.

Finally, however, we have another trick up our sleeves - at the moment, most signups come from one-time lurkers. We log all IPs on registration, and can easily see if it’s someone who’s visited before, or do a search on location to see if it’s consistent.

So, in short, it’s a pain approving all sign-ups, but it provides a certain level of security and peace of mind for posters. And sad as it is, pretty much all forums do it now. I’ve taken up sewing/knitting recently, and the couple of forums I signed up for to learn more both required me to fill out everything short of a CV to get approved! If you’re waiting to come and post, and impatient to know why it’s taking so long, that’s why.

So, in a spirit of adventurousness, exploring new frontiers (albeit frontiers that are, by internet standards, about as unexplored as Las Vegas) etc etc I set up blogging software here. But why? And, when I set myself up a blog, what did I have in mind?

Well, I had a range of ideas in mind, to be honest. I thought about the normal, day-to-day, outrageously hilarious blog I could no doubt do in my sleep. But then I realised that would be unfair on all the other normal, day-to-day, non-hilarious bloggers out there. I’m posting bitingly witty satires of contemporary mores and they’re posting pictures of their cats dressed up as penguins or what have you. OK, that was a bad example, because cats dressed as ANYTHING is hilarious, but you get the point.

Then I considered a crochet/knitting/sewing blog, as I’m in the middle of one of my Ma phases, when running up food, clothing and the odd house for a growing family in the middle of the prarie seems quite appealling, actually. Yes, they lived a simple life, devoid of many pleasures, but they never had to choose between Strictly Come Dancing, X-Factor, or throwing themselves off the roof on a Saturday night. They made their own fun, and if that fun involved being maimed by farming implements at nine years old, or having to listen to Pa explain that your lost penny/maiming/lingering death from cholera was your own damn fault week after week after week, so be it. However, I think I’ll save my insights into half-double crochet vs double for another blog, another time.

So, as this is the newest venture under the umbrella of Badgerworld Enterprises*, I thought I’d concentrate on life as a forum admin. I know I have tried to be as open as possible about the forum, but still I tend to assume everyone knows what we’re about, where we’re from, etc, and that ain’t necessarily so. So I’ll try and answer questions about the place and just provide a snapshot of what it takes to run a forum, where I’d like to go, and what goes on in that dark place behind the scenes (note: this may be scary for younger readers). I am also very lazy, so posts might be sporadic, but hey, that’s part of my charm!

*company does not exist.

I hope you’re not expecting anything profound here. I’m just making sure I didn’t break the internet.