Sup guys. Don't adjust your television set, I've got a few orders of business to tell you about, and they're kind of important. It's really long winded this time so bear with me here.
First off, my long-time roommate and several year veteran Uboachan poster Izumi was just given moderator powers a few days ago, and is now getting situated. It's a bit unusual for a user to be promoted directly to Moderator status without being a Janitor first, but I need some more direct help running the site, and I feel that living together with someone else on the staff will give me a partner to collaborate with on a day-to-day basis if need be. It's really nice to have another person here in my house who's been active on Uboachan longer than I've been running the place, and I hope that it will help us communicate better with the entire staff team if we go at running things together. The staff list in the FAQ is also up to date again.
I'm sure everyone's noticed the annoying CP spam that's been constantly appearing on the boards. Bit of bad news here. I've tried setting up countermeasures such as phrase filters to automatically block posts, but as soon as I set them up, the bot changed tactics and stopped duplicating phrases between posts or leaving links in the post body. Unfortunately, this is a confirmation of our worst fear regarding these spam waves: they're only partially automated. An actual living and breathing pedo scumbag is behind the scenes, willfully and actively adjusting the bot's parameters to break through our security measures every time we update them. Not even captchas will stop a human. There is literally no way to stop the spam, and there never will be, and it will probably never go away until the person responsible is tracked down and arrested. Most likely they're in another country and this will never ever happen. All we can do is hire more Janitors to try and keep on top of them and hope they give up eventually. Sorry guys, I know it sucks but there's nothing I can realistically do here except ramp up our cleanup efforts. Though, if any of you have any novel ideas, please find and post in the relevant thread in /sugg/. I'd be happy to hear some fresh thoughts.
Further compounding the above issue is a weird bug we've nicknamed the "Ghost Thread Bug", which prevents threads from dying properly when a staff member deletes them. Deleting the thread deletes the image and makes the thread page 404, but a shadow thread remains on the board index and won't go away until someone else posts in the board or an administrator manually rebuilds the index. This is a huge pain in the ass and leaves garbage everywhere each time we clean up a spam wave. I've tried a couple things to fix it but they didn't work, and what's more the thread deletion code looks correct and I can't figure out why it isn't working. Even worse still, the maintainer for our software has basically retired and I don't have the skills anymore to track down the glitch in the codebase. If anyone here is competent at PHP debugging, please email me and I'll set you to work tracking this thing down. (My email address is in the FAQ.)
On a lighter note, I recently found out that the Oekaki module has been broken for at least a month. Oops. We needed some configuration changes to support a new version that was updated in some time ago, which have now been added, so it should work again. Go play around and help me test it here:
https://uboachan.net/test/res/159.htmlAlso, for any Uboachanners on the west coast US, I'm going to be departing northbound on a road trip from Willits, California on the 23rd of this month with Izumi and a few other friends and settling in Bremerton, Washington for ~10 days before we turn around and head back to Sacramento. I can't stop to meet anyone on the way up, but I may be able to stop for short hangouts on the way back south, depending on how things turn out. If you'll be in Bremerton from the 24th of November to the 3rd of December, or somewhere along the route back to Sacramento around the 3rd, or if you live in my general Sacramento area, email me some time! I love offline meets. Again my email address is in the FAQ.
That's all for this time. This is a big news post, so I might make some edits in the next couple days, in which case I'll note it at the bottom here. Thanks for reading!
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