bco-admin

We have made some recent server changes to try to improve the performance of the boards.  Please let us know by private message if anyone continues to experience poor performance on the boards so we can try to look into it right away.  Thanks!

-Tech team

We are working to eliminate this inappropriate material and will add further restrictions to try to eliminate this type of behavior.  Thanks for your suggestions.

-Tech team 

Hi everyone, visited links should now show in a different color.  Thanks!

-Tech team

The system has been restarted.  Please let us know if anyone continues to have any issues with poor response time from the discussion boards.

Thanks,

-Tech team 

Folks, we have restarted the application which we hope will clear up these current issues and we are investigating the cause of these slow downs.  Please let us know if anyone continues to have speed issues.

Thanks!

-Tech team 

As many of you may have noticed already, the search interface has changed.  The updates now allow you to search by keywords but also by user, time period and topic.  The search results are ordered by date by default but may also be re-ordered by relevancy.  Please let us know if you have questions or concerns.

Thanks!

-Tech team 

Thanks everyone for your patience.  We believe this problem has been corrected.  Please send us a PM or respond to this conversation if the problem persists.

-Tech team 

Hi Ann,

This updated search is both a work in progress and you've caught us in the middle of rebuilding the search index.  So, over the next few hours we'll be indexing all the comments in the community.  This does mean the results will increase and change order a bit while this index is being rebuilt.  We'll try to keep everyone more informed as we make further changes.

Thanks,

Tech team

Thanks everyone.  I believe we have remove this round of spam and are working on ways to slow down this problem.

-Tech Team 

Everyone, thanks for your continued suggestions and passion for keeping this community thriving.  We are trying hard to ease the frustrating spam problems.  Unfortunately, changes take time and money and, as many have pointed out, this is a moving target.  Spammers are persistent and the effective ones are even smart.  Changing user names, IP addresses and even the story that goes along with their spam is easy for them and really does not increase their work in spreading their spam so we have shied away from relatively easy but ineffective changes.

• In addition, we have stayed away from authenticating email addresses because so many users have a hard time negotiating spam filters and end up trapped with no way to join the community.  Although many of you are very savvy Internet users a large demographic on this community consists of older women who have never or infrequently used the Internet.  The most frustrating part for them is when they then figure out how to submit a contact on our site but our response is also filtered so they then think we are ignoring their contact.  This leaves them with no way of joining the community and a frustration with not being able to get answers to their technical questions.  We are exploring ways to authenticate email and use this as part of a rate-limiting algorithm.  For example, a new user may be able to post only once per day unless they have authenticated their email.

We also hope to add a simple content filter so objectionable phrases and URLs can be easily disallowed from any new comments.

The content filter we hope to release in the next two weeks and other changes we hope to be able to add over the next few months.  We will do our best to keep everyone posted.