Neil

After some delay because of some external factors, v6.0 of aberdeen-music is now finally live. After nearly three days of downtime I hope at least some of you will think it was worth the wait! There is still a lot of tweaking to be done on the new design and features. But all areas of the web site should be functioning, with the exception of the automatic addition of events posted in the Gigs & Events forum into the calendar. At present, if you want your event added to the calendar then you must add it to the calendar directly. I'm hoping to have this functionality back in place before long though and there will be a separate announcement once this has been done. If you encounter any problems, nor matter how trivial or minor, please post them as either a reply to this thread or as a new thread in the following forum: http://www.aberdeen-music.com/forums/technical-problems/ If you also have any questions regarding the new site and features then please also post here or in the forum above. Thanks again for your patience everyone.

Just a quick update - the site will probably be closing at around 11pm tonight, if not later. Why? Because I'm going to the pub first.

Use Firefox and you won't have this problem.

I wouldn't worry about it. She didn't leave any comments anyway and it's still unclear whether she was trying to leave positive or negative reputation.

EmoSkatergirl16 Neil 02:27, 12th Jul 2008 EmoSkatergirl16 Cloud 02:44, 12th Jul 2008 EmoSkatergirl16 JF9TP2 02:45, 12th Jul 2008 EmoSkatergirl16 Lucky Rathen 02:45, 12th Jul 2008 Heh, didn't realise she tried to give me bad rep as well! The fool.

It's possible - but a bot that tries to give out reputation to a handful of random users? Bot's exist normally to just spam forums.

It resolves to Belize. And the e-mail address she(?) registered with and verified on this web site matches the e-mail address on her Hi5 profile.

Shhh. I don't need some do-gooder tipping off the tax man!

The aberdeen-music last.fm group.

I fear you'd jump off a bridge if I did though.

I've had an idea. Maybe when I take the site offline on Friday I just won't bring it back up?

Which is fair enough. Except you post just as much abuse as they do - usually in your opening gambit. Presumably to get people's attention and to get someone to take the bait and reply. And you wonder why you receive so much abuse back...

Are you being sarcastic?

Yep, unfortunately some people go to the effort of accessing the web site through proxy servers hosted in exotic countries in order to hide their identify (yes, some people are actually that sad on here) so the IP address can often be no use. I've found this particular user's Hi5 profile page though: hi5 - xxXxxXxxEmoSkaterGirl16xxXxxXxx Fake or not fake? It's a lot of effort to go if it's fake.

aberdeen-music - FAQ: User Reputation System Although I now need to update that particular FAQ article, it's still mostly accurate.

In some people's opinion, yes, that might be considered abuse. But there has to be some common sense applied here. Calling someone a simpleton is not quite the same as calling someone a cunt, for example. Sometimes we (the staff) get it right, sometimes we get it wrong and sometimes we miss it altogether (remember to use the Report Post function everyone - we don't have time to read everything). I think we do a pretty good job overall as if we weren't there wouldn't be anyone left posting here. Personally, I think overall, we are actually too easy on people. There are some people still posting on these forums that would have been banned long ago on other web sites. I suspect that's what you're getting at.

Is this EmoSkatergirl16 you are referring to? Because I've just checked and he/she has been trying to hand out reputation to all sorts of people - so don't feel hard done by. You'll notice if you look on your profile page, where the last 5 reputation comments can be viewed, that the icon beside the reputation they tried to give you is grey in colour - this means it has had no affect on your reputation score. I think I'm going to made reputation comments mandatory again at least. And if I find out EmoSkatergirl16 is someone's second account then I think there is going to be a little bit of banning going on.

If they have just signed up then they won't be able to leave you any positive or negative reputation as they will have 0 influence. They can still leave you reputation comments, but they can't affect your reputation score.

No, people shouldn't be able to give staff members reputation. If they can, then this is something I need to look at.

This isn't making us immune from criticism though. You can criticise the staff (only constructively please!) in the threads as normal, or separately in the Comments & Suggestions forum and of course privately via PM/e-mail. I accept the reputation system is a good way of giving on-the-spot feedback about a particular post though, be it positive or negative. The reason I actually had in mind when I disabled staff from being able to use this system is the staff being accused of favouritism or victimisation if they were to give give/take away reputation from other users. Take myself for example, because of how many posts I've made and how long I've been registered on the web site, my influence level is probably around 25 points. So one negative reputation comment from me and that is someone losing 25 reputation points right there and then. And what punishments and rewards? One of the rewards is likely to be Supporter status once someone gets X amount of positive feedback. Such a status would be of no benefit to a staff member. Punishments might include temporary bans once someone reaches X amount of negative feedback - what happens if a staff member were to get banned? Yes, it would be amusing, but if it happened to me then no-one would be in control of the web site! Do see what I'm getting at? By keeping the staff out of it completely then we leave the users to rate each other and only each other. The staff remain neutral.

Probably Amndoa Amarga. Lethal stuff I seem to recall.

FYI, the off-topic part of this thread (which was my fault to be honest!) has been split into a new thread in a more appropriate forum: http://www.aberdeen-music.com/forums/comments-suggestions/50564-received-wisdom-split-thread.html

The advertising plus our supporting members (who kindly pay their 3 a month) not only pays for the web hosting in full but has, for the last couple of years or so, even left us with some money left over. And before you get excited, that money isn't lining my pockets but instead sits in a separate bank account and is used to pay for other on-going costs (e.g. vBulletin licence renewals etc) and used to fund new features on the web site (e.g. mobile version of the forums). All of which you should be rather satisfied with otherwise you wouldn't be able to spend your days looking at this web site all the time.

Well the Snafu banners are usually rather fetching. If I take them down then I can count on you paying me my 200 a month web hosting bill just to keep this web site online? Ah, thought not.

I have a revenue stream concept? Awesome. Can someone tell me what it is?