Downtide

I think I’ll remain agnostic on that one. Ask me again in 50 years and I’ll probably know the answer by then. Unless I happen to somehow reach the age of 106 without dying, in which case I’ll take a raincheck.

I think lemmings is the best one. Lemmings are cute.

yes, because no ads basically means my antivirus software has nothing to do. Creators have no choice over what ads are served up with the content and 99% of ads are loaded with malware whether you click on them or not.

Creators need to come up with better ways to monetise their content instead of relying on them.

Classic martini, dirty, with an olive.

The trouble with any sort of captcha or test, is that it teaches the bots how to pass the test. Every time they fail, or guess correctly, that’s a data-point for their own learning. By developing AI in the first place we’ve already ruined every hope we have of creating any kind of test to find them.

I used to moderate a fairly large forum that had a few thousand sign-ups every day. Every day, me and the team of mods would go through the new sign-ups, manually checking usernames and email addresses. The ones that were bots were usually really easy to spot. There would be sequences of names, both in the usernames and email addresses used, for example ChristineHarris913, ChristineHarris914, ChristineHarris915 etc. Another good tell was mixed-up ethnicities in the names: e.g ChristineHuang or ChinLaoHussain. 99% of them were from either China, India or Russia (they mostly don’t seem to use VPNs, I guess they don’t want to pay for them). We would just ban them all en-masse. Each account banned would get an automated email to say so. Legitimate people would of course reply to that email to complain, but in the two years I was a mod there, only a tiny handful ever did, and we would simply apologise and let them back in. A few bots slipped through the net but rarely more than 1 or 2 a day; those we banned as soon as they made their first spam post, but we caught most of them before that.

So, I think the key is a combination of the No-Captcha, which analyses your activity on the sign-up page, combined with an analysis of the chosen username and email address, and an IP check. But don’t use it to stop the sign-up, let them in and then use it to decide whether or not to ban them.

My daughter joined Neopets in its early days, when she was about 13 or 14. She’s 34 now and still active there.

I started on mailing lists in the mid 1990s. I forget the name of the platform I started on* but it got taken over by eGroups and then Yahoo, and started to suck a bit after that. Basicaly, you’d go to the website to find groups to subscribe to, and all the content would come to you by email. You reply by email, and your reply went to everyone subscribed to that particular group. It was crude but efficient, and I really miss some of those communities.

• I found it. It was OneList.

Yes they do, and its almost impossible to say which is “best”. There’s one that’s best for your paper/canvas, your brushes and your technique. The only way to find the best for you, is to buy a few tubes of different brands and see which ones you prefer/find easiest. And don’t worry about wasting paints if you don’t like them; stick with white and primary colours and you can use the others for different techniques. You can even mix paint of different brands, to get a balance between them.

Only if Spez leaves and is replaced by a decent CEO who reverses EVERYTHING that Spez has effed up in the past few years. I’d return for some small niche communities I participate on that aren’t present in the lemmy-verse (yet). But I’d stay here too. I am committed to Federated services now.