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Monday, August 3, 2009

NorthSide's Discussion Board Gone?

After a one month, McEagle's discussion board for NorthSide vanished from the Internet today. On the forum page is the message "We are currently in the process of restructuring our discussion board. Please check back in the future for updates."

The discussion board recently had sprouted spam threads with titles including "R82 in Lexington buy xenical and propecia online," "husband that is cheating?" "How to Plan and Build a Business Part-Time."

Besides the spam, the fboard was notable for its silence. On July 10, blogger Rick Bonasch posted "Mum's the word at McEagle's NorthSide forum" at the NorthSide Blog, noting the lack of replies from McEagle to questions and comments posted on the board. On the board, after several posters including myself asked when answers might be coming, Julie Gagnon of McEagle responded that McEagle would handle responses at weekly project meetings and report back to online readers. No such post was ever made.

2 comments:

barbara_on_19th said...

Right now, on Monday evening, McKee is having yet another private meeting at Bethlehem M.B. a church at Grand and Cass, just on the edge of the development footprint, in a building NOT on his TIF list. Why not a public meeting in a secular building where all are invited? This isn't a theocracy, right?

Anonymous said...

Spam is a common occurrence on online forums where the operator doesn't know how to use spam-prevention techniques (i.e. captchas).

Nevertheless, the forum software used, phpBB, is open source, and its anti-spam mechanisms
are both matured and well-known:
http://www.phpbb.com/blog/2009/06/27/3-0-6-captcha-plugins-and-you/
http://recaptcha.net/plugins/phpbb/

It's probably fair to say that spam was not the deciding factor in this online forum being taken down.