Sorry about that.  Thge forum moderation queue is kind of wonky in that even if a post is approved, it gets held in a weird state where it's "invisible" unless an admin edits and re-saves it.  I've instructed people on this, but it's likely that someone approved your post and forgot this (non-obvious) step.  I'll try to find it.

As for the user profile, I've got a huge backlog of them that I need to tackle.  User profiles are where we get the majority of our spam, so I had to put the approval system in place, but there are just too many to be easily dealt with (there are about 900 right now).

There are a few possible solutions to this:

• Make all user profile links "nofollow" and then make them public
• Only put the profiles of active users in the approval queue (that is, users who have posted something other than a profile, or have at least logged in once after registering)
• Build some sort of system where registered users can see a few profile links on the front page and flag them as either legit or spammy

I think I like the second option best.  The first one is unfair to legit users and the third one is too random and inconsistent.

At any rate, your profile is approved.

No problem.  This is another one of those things I'm going to have to address sooner rather than later. 

@bart if you want/feel like it, I am willing to help out with either the moderation queue or the user profiles. I can't and don't claim in expertise other than calling out spam.If you need a hand, just holler me. You have my e-mail credentials as well.

I might take you up on that once I fix the queue to only show people who have actually accessed the site after first creating their profile.  A lot of people create drive-by profiles and never come back.  If someone makes a profile and never looks at the site again, they won't really be around to care if their profile is visible or not. :)

I've optimized the query a bit to figure out which users are in need of approval, and I've narrowed it down to less than 300 accounts.  Worse than I'd hoped, but a lot more manageable regardless.  Other people will pop up in the queue if they ever, ya know, access the site again. :)

I can help with the obvious ones, though I noticed that recently a number of the ones that got through had remarkably realistic usernames (I suspect they may finally be doing what I would do, harvesting real usernames from membership lists).

What I'm hoping is that these changes will make it so that the vast majority of the ones I have to sift through are in good faith.  I'm going to try moderating some accounts this evening and report back.

So, turns out my filter is getting some false negatives that I can't quite figure out at the moment, but it's time to stop working on it for the day.

At least, the 300 or so accounts that did remain in the approval queue were all legit except for one, so it was a pretty solid heuristic.

I made a topic 4 days ago in Resource Requests that I have heard nothing from since. It was kinda lengthy, I hope it isn't lost to the cyber-abyss. =L

Roughly, what is the average approval time that I should expect to wait before I start getting worried?

Sorry about that.  The spam filter is funny about forum posts.  Sometimes it just makes them invisible on the main forum without notifying me or marking them as unpublished, which means I don't see them.

Your post is live now.

I've just edited my OP on that topic, now it has disappeared.

I can still access it, but it doesn't show up anywhere on forums. =(

Speaking to spam accounts; The number of spam users I was getting on my own forums dropped off dramatically after I started using http://stopforumspam.com/

I set up their automatic spamification thingy that checks new users against a database of known spammers, but even without the automatic part, it's pretty useful for manually determining if a new user is a known spammer or not.

Don't know if you have something like this already, but thought I'd share just in case. :)

I made a topic days ago in Show of your Project and it hasn't appeared.   Can someone check for a technical issue?

This is an unfortunate technical issue that's been cropping up.  Unfortunately it's not something I can fix, but contact Bart and he will sort it out.

Still no response from Bart.  I don't even know who else would be able to fix this.  This is really disheartening; Making a thread shouldn't take weeks.

Oh dang.  I'm really sorry to hear that, I'll definitely bring it up to him or Botanic when next I see them on IRC.  Bart, as you might guess, has been pretty busy recently, so he must have missed your message.

I've got the same problem; posted my game in the showing-off-forum, but it is not yet visible. That was 8 days ago. Also, my profile shows this: Project link will be visible after this account is approved.

So maybe the profile AND the thread need to be approved?

I had no luck finding one of the admins as mentioned here in the IRC channel. I wrote BartK directly via IRC two times now, but didn't get a response so far.

This is kinda sad, because I think (hope) that my game has some relevance to pixel and sound artists in this community, as they will be able to upload their own work into an existing mmorpg. And of course, I'm already using some of the awesome free stuff here (e.g. from my previous speaker Redshrike). So this forum/site/community has a special place and meaning among my advertisements.

This issue should now be resolved for Spider Dave, Arcanorum and Rammy, their forum topics have been removed from the spam filter and should now be approved and published.  Please let me know if this hasn't resolved the problem for you. This was exactly the issue as described by Bart above, and the only solution is ongoing monitoring of the spam queue.

Tell you what...  I'm kind of curious how much spam is being stopped by the actual filter, versus how much is being stopped by the bot countermeasures I've put in place.  Lately I've been seeing a lot of very spammy stuff get through the filter and a fair amount of legit stuff get mod-queued.  I don't know how much, if any, the spam filter is deleting outright.

So I think what I'm going to do is disable it for an hour or two and see if we get a tremendous flood of spam.  If so, then clearly that's not the right solution.  If not, then it might be worth having people report the relatively small volume of spam that we get right now and not have all these problems with false positives keeping valuable posts from showing up on the forums.

Well...  the spam filter has been off all night, and unless people are suddenly unable to post at all for some reason, I'm fairly convinced at this point that it's of negative value to the site, and that it's my anti-bot measures that are keeping the influx of spam down.

If this holds true and we don't suddenly get inundted with spam later today, then I have to apologize for running the spam filter at all (if that's the case, I'm a bit irritated that I've actually been *paying* for it, since if it hasn't been silently preventing a huge volume of spam from being posted, which I assumed it was, it hasn't been much better than random chance at determining which posts are actually spammy).

Based on the logs, the spam seems to come in infrequent short bursts, which would imply they had been checking for gaps, looking for posting tecniques which get through. This is also reinforced by all the recent attempts to access wp-admin, methodically going through every possible url it could be at.  There is every chance they'll notice they aren't being blocked at some point and then launch a full scale spam attack. Probably not worth canceling the spam filter subscription altogether just yet.

Well, I'll keep paying for it.  It's only a few bucks a month.  That being said, it seems to me like it's not doing a very good job of actually filtering spam.  The "buy credit card numbers" crap seems to get through it repeatedly even though I've been reporting it as spam and it should frankly be obvious already.

Anyway, if we do get a flood, I can always turn it back on.  I'm just not convinced at this point that it really does very much good.  In fact, I've got my own module that I built that does some custom regular expression checks, and I find that, since spam tends to be people repeatedly posting the exact same crap, it tends to work pretty well, even though that's not the currently "accepted" way of identifying spam.

Also, maybe it's just me, posting comments feels a lot more responsive now.

The thread is now visible; thank you guys!

Can I get some one to look at my link also.

It's not a project link but it is the reason im on here it's a link to my work in hopes of getting more work its

abit frustrating to get 4 or 5 likes a week and to not have one job offer.

Your account is now approved.  I have no idea how it went so long without being approved tbh.  Sorry about that.

No problem Red your a gentelmen and a scholar thanks or the prompted response and keep up the good work

I didn't read much of that, but you could make it so an account without at least one submission gets deleted in a week, and make it so you have to have one submission to post on the forums, ect. (Do I put two periods after an abbreviation, or would that annoy an English Marm, I wonder if anyone got both of those puns).

That would mean that my account would get deleted as I have no submissions.

Requiring one submission before being able to post on forums will just result in a spam of white squares or similar. It will be just as much a nusance to new users as to the spammers.

I notice the forum user signatures are appearing now. I didn't realise that they previously didn't show up.

Well that was an uncooked idea. Thanks for not being offended.