Always look on the bright side. Pirates is a test project, and the recent defacement of the forums has uncovered a bug in how BOINC handles usernames. It's also given me a bit more experience with how the forums are implemented.

The bug was that a user could change their username to be empty or just whitespace. That's been fixed and a patch posted to the boinc_dev mailing list.

The account of the offender has been locked out but not deleted. I'll turn it back on when I think he/she might behave like an adult.

BOINC 4.57 has just come out, and this includes new forum functions, including moderators. We'll give it a try once I get through the upgrade.

Also note that the users can already rate posts, and filter messages based on those ratings.

The overall goal is to create a discussion forum for users which does not require a lot of attention from the administrators. That won't scale well to a million or more users. Instead, the community should have the tools to shape the discussion themselves, with occasional intervention only when necessary.

Thanks, as always, to everybody helping with this test project.

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-- Eric Myers

"Education is not the filling of a pail, but the lighting of a fire." -- William Butler Yeats

While the immature actions of the few are always a headache for admin... your attitude and response are a true testament to who you are and what Pirats/Einstein stands for.

Its good to know that BOINC are going to at least have the option to "share the load" with Forum Moderators... its something that has been mentioned over and over again over the years (from SETI and up) and I think would free up time for admin to do other important admin stuff.


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