Anonymous posting

Submitted by AppleVis on Wednesday, August 4, 2010.
Member of the AppleVis Editorial Team
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The AppleVis web site is currently configured to allow unregistered users to add comments to existing content.These comments are posted directly onto the site without any form of moderation.

However, it is likely that this will change in the near future, as this leaves the site wide open to the automated spam bots that crawl the Internet for places to post their rubbish. These bots have yet to find this site, but once they do, I suspect that our very basic CAPTCHA system will offer little protection.

Although it would be possible to introduce a moderation system, the wait for this moderation to take place can spoil the flow of discussion. For that reason, anonymous posting of comments will be disabled at some point, and only registered users will be able to post to the site.

David

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Comments

Submitted by Darrell Hilliker on Wednesday, August 4, 2010

I would like to see a site policy prohibiting anonymous postings of any kind. Let's allow nonregistered users to read to their heart's content but require registration for all postings of comments or site content of any kind.

Submitted by AppleVis on Wednesday, August 25, 2010

Member of the AppleVis Editorial Team

As anticipated, the spam bots have now found this site.

Rather than spending all our time cleaning up after them, we have disabled the option that allowed anonymous users to add comments to articles and to post replies over here in the forum. You will now need to be registered and logged in to do so.

We shall continue to monitor this situation, and will consider other options if the spam problem persists.

If for some reason you prefer not to register, you can still submit content for inclusion on this site via the Submit Information page, as all submissions through that page by unregistered users are manually processed.

David