Hi good people
I'm a junior member of the admin team at forums.debian.net. I'll just
copy/paste my reply to the thread Mez has started in the admin chat
section of the forums:
>>>"I read that mailing list thread but don't get the point. The only
concerns about "safety" I know of concern the fact the forums are http,
not https.
I've been a member of the forums since 2006 and Spam Hunter for a year
or so. IMO the forums have improved over that time and the current admin
team do an admirable job.
Banning of members is almost exclusively for spammers, with only 1 or 2
others this year for bad behaviour and then only temporarily.
An FAQ section has been introduced which has helped to reduce the
incidence of "go RTFM" to virtually nil. Try that on the Arch forums
which are much more elitist than FDN. The participation of DDs to answer
some of the more difficult technical questions would be welcomed
although there are some quite knowledgeable regulars and very few
questions go unanswered.
The main concern for admins is the lack of maintenance on the servers
where there have been reports that CAPTCHA doesn't work properly and the
listed admin contact emails are not contactable. Thanks Mez for what you
do but the servers' software seems to need more regular attention.
The forums contain an encyclopaedia of Debian knowledge and answers to
both common and rare issues, and is obviously way more popular as a
reference than a simple post count would suggest as there are usually
hundreds of people reading at any time - currently "In total there are
200 users online :: 1 registered, 2 hidden and 197 guests (based on
users active over the past 5 minutes)". To close the forums would be a
travesty and leave a major vacuum in online knowledge and assistance for
Debian users.
To alleviate those occasional complaints about safety, enable https.
And I would suspect the complaints alluded to on the mailing list may
have come from someone like bkpsusmitaa who has been a serial menace and
was just banned for a week for abusing the post report system. You can
check if the IP they come from was from Barrackpore and Mysore, most
recently 117.208.152.101 .
The supposed complaints are likely an attempt to disrupt by someone with
an axe to grind. I'm very interested to read exactly what those
complaints are. The admin team have not received any recently to my
knowledge."
Respectfully
Roger E.
