Goodnight Ford Tinkerer's.

 

Good Friday morning Ford Tinkerer's.

 

Morning Chris, I like the new toy!

 

Good afternoon Andy and.
Roadside lunch break to finish the week.

Andy the mini excavator will sure save my shoulders and back.

 

Goodnight Ford Tinkerer's.

 

Good evening Oregon and everyone everywhere else.

 

Good morning Oregon and everyone everywhere else. 42, holding steady, with copious amounts of torrential downpour. No dog kennel construction or raised self-watering flower bed today.
All this rain means I want have to get the big irrigation pump connected up to the pond, primed and operational for a few days now.

 

Good Saturday morning Ford Tinkerer's.
0.02 inches of rain since midnight now thin cloud cover that's breaking up with patches of blue.

 

Good morning Chris. It was raining so hard here that even the Geese were heading for cover. Calamity Jane just sat on the porch saying nope, no way...I'll hold it until this stuff stops! Snoopy thought it would be fun to play, roll, swim and get wet before coming back into the house.

 

Have you heard of anything going on site wide Chris? Posting in several of the threads I keep getting the "Your post is pending moderator review" message. Logged out, cleared the chache, didn't make a difference, still get it. Have you seen any of this?

 

Nothing like that for me.
Have noticed since the new badges it has slowed down.

 

Your posts came to my attention, as the regular moderators haven't been here for the last couple of days for this and the other forums where your posts were "pending moderator review." So I approved them all for you... at least a half dozen.

This isn't a "site wide" issue. There were a couple of other posts pending review, but your posts made up the lionshare of the moderated posts pending review. I haven't been able to figure out why yet. If it happens to you again, try posting a post without mentioning "torrential rain" and let's see what happens. Perhaps the software sees "torrent" out of context, and sequesters the post for human review. But that is only a wild guess.

 

Good Sunday morning Ford Tinkerer's.

 

@Seabiscuit-P3

It appears that my guess may have been correct about the adjective that you used to describe the recent high volume of rain that you reported.

That adjective, which begins and ends with the letter "T" and has the letter "R" twice in succession, evidently triggers FTE's recently revised automated anti-spam software filter.

That filter was put in place to stop mass spammers in their tracks, before they wall paper the forum with dozens of posts about how to watch pay per view events on their bootleg sites for free, using a downloading method described by the same word that you recently described the heavy rains in your area with.

Ironically, in the conversations that led to the expansion of this technique to arrest runaway spam, I argued that it is better for a moderator to review posts having specific sets of words that mass spammers typically use to advertise what mass spammers typically advertise, than it is to go to bed and wake up to a runaway wall of spam posts that mushroomed overnight unchecked.

What you experienced is one of the side effects of this automated antidote. I've come up with an if/then statement idea to lessen or eliminate this side effect, but I'm not sure if the IB folks who grind the gears under the hood can accommodate it. And the programming tweak might enable another type of spammer to runaway with the store, but that type of spammer is rarer.

There is a balance to be struck between member inconvenience and member irritation. Certainly, an upstanding, well known, well respected, highly participatory long time FTE member like yourself should not be having their posts auto-moderated. On the other hand, the recent expansion of keyword auto-moderating, along with other changes, internal API's, and moderation tools, have SUBSTANTIALLY reduced the amount of spam, and the amount of volunteer time donated toward removing that spam, on FTE. It cannot be over-emphasized how effective some of the recently invoked FTE website tweaks have been.

The addition of user honor badges was coincidental to, and occurred concurrently with, these other website tweaks, but is not likely to be the cause of what you experienced, as potentially implied.

If it helps you feel any better, my post quoted above was auto-moderated (rendered not visible) as well. That post was actually my test to see if what I guessed to be the cause for your posting problem was correct. I posted it last night, went to bed, and when I returned this morning, my post was auto-moderated and removed. I had to approve my own post. That is why I think the aforementioned (well, not actually mentioned, but described) T word triggered your posts not appearing.

Even this current post of mine, that you are reading presently, was auto-moderated. But this time I knew to check for it, and sure enough, it was moderated, because I re-quoted my earlier post that had the trigger word fully spelled. Therefore, I had to "approve" my own post again before the post would appear. It is good that this experience happened to both of us, as it provides inspiration for FTE to come up with better ways to skin the cat.

Carry on!

 

@@Y2KW57
And here I thought the IRS was coming after me because I had a meeting with them and raised enough hate and discontent that they are actually returning money they "misdirected" or "misappropriated" from me. Hey, I was trying to be nice as we all know the IRS wouldn't steal money from us!

Chris is the Chapter Leader here, but thanks for the compliment. Since I am a moderator for the "enemy" I can't be anything but me here.
So when it is raining really hard we'll have to use a variation of tore ren shul. Darned Spammers. I hate spammers.