FTAO - The AAT
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[Deleted User]
Posts: 0
Hi,
Are you not able to edit the forum where you can only sign in using your AAT membership number? This will avoid SPAM.
Are you not able to edit the forum where you can only sign in using your AAT membership number? This will avoid SPAM.
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Comments
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Many of the people who contribute here are not current members of the AAT, myself included. If you excluded us, you'd be excluding a lot of the help and knowledge that we offer, not just AAT world experiences but also real life, work based ones too.0
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Many of the people who contribute here are not current members of the AAT, myself included. If you excluded us, you'd be excluding a lot of the help and knowledge that we offer, not just AAT world experiences but also real life, work based ones too.
So you have no ties with the AAT? How come?0 -
No current ties but I am an ex-student. Like several on here, I got to passing the best bits of Technician (DFS, tax, CMCC) but life intervened and led my accounting career on a different path.0
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There are many people here who are former students but not members of the AAT, some have moved onto become members of other accountancy bodies, some (like me) are not currently employed in an accountancy role and there will, no doubt, be others with perfectly legitimate reasons for not being members. In addition, requiring membership to access the forums would prevent prospective students from discussing the course here.
Both me and blobbyh (amongst other former members) have made substantial contributions to this forum over several years and (I like to think) continue to do so. Excluding people like us with experience and knowledge would diminish the forums much more than the occasional spam attack.
Dealing with spam is pretty straightforward. The real problem here is not one of membership but is, rather, that stopping spam requires something we don't have and that's admins who are attentive to what's going on in the forum on a day-to-day basis and who deal with issues as and when they arise.0 -
Well said Chris. And as a non-member of the AAT, I'm able to go a little bit further than most when I say that (IMO) the current forum administrators are a joke. Examples?
The early declaration that spam was a thing of the past followed by an almost immediate breach. Shades of Kevin Keegan.
The lost weekend three weeks ago when the forum was down Saturday to Tuesday morning and James had to nip down to PC World to get the Tech Guys help. Okay, so I made that last bit up but you can see where I'm heading.
The accidental banning of Adam R. Pretty inexplicable really.
Hmmmm....0 -
FWIW this is how I'd deal with spam if I was admin
1. Be attentive to what's going on, visit the forum regularly both in and out of office hours (spammers don't work 9-5 and take weekends off) and if there's spam delete it and ban the users quickly.
2. Moderate the first post of new users. Make sure this is done quickly so people aren't waiting around to see their post on the forum.
Simple, it just needs proactive, engaged admins. What? Oh, yeah, sorry, I forgot.0 -
I had a look at one of the smap posts and the user was marked as banned yet the post was still thee, even in my non technical view that is a bit daft!0
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Sorry meant spam - fingers and brain not connected today, maybe I should be an AAT forum moderator today?0
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How did you know, are you spying on me - got a cold one right next to me here!0
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*Takes a nice cold shot of Irn Bru to warm the cockles !*
Would it be possible to vote for a couple of regular users (obviously with a certain minimum time served on the forums, 1 year maybe) to help out with monitoring ?
And strictly just admin for the forum.
Would this be viable ?0 -
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On other forums I am on new people have to have posts validated before becoming public.
Maybe it would be possible to have say 5 posts validated before you are allowed to post pubically without validation, however this could then cause problems with lack of quick moderation, maybe as said above non staff moderators could check them.0 -
That would be a good idea Garry but the fact that the spam posts still haven't been deleted after a week would suggest that none of the admins are regularly checking the forum, if at all. Any new joiner could be waiting indefinitely to become validated, eventually getting so frustrated they never come back.
The appointment of regular forum users as moderators is an old idea and unfortunately one the admins in charge have never responded to.0 -
I see James Cristiano is online and has removed the newest lot of spam though the old lot is still there - at least for now.
However my main question is this? With the exams now extremely imminent, actually how robust is this forum? With the constant spamming (despite assurances it's not supposed to happen) combined with frequent and lengthy breakdowns plus the usual explosion in user activity at this time of year, it doesn't bode well for forum accessibility within the next fortnight. Are there any assurances the admins can offer to users of the forum that it'll be there when they need it as bitter experience tends to dictate otherwise?0 -
That would be a good idea Garry but the fact that the spam posts still haven't been deleted after a week would suggest that none of the admins are regularly checking the forum, if at all. Any new joiner could be waiting indefinitely to become validated, eventually getting so frustrated they never come back.
The appointment of regular forum users as moderators is an old idea and unfortunately one the admins in charge have never responded to.
Thats it robert i nominate (spelt perfectly
) you for forum moderator (then again you would have us all banned ) 0 -
Ooh I dunno Vic. With this lot of planks in charge, you can pretty much write whatever you want and it'll be there until James or Simon do their random surveillance visits for a couple of hours once a fortnight. Maybe they're busy studying too? NVQ2 for web designers?
There're a quite a lot of people logged on now so you can tell it's exam time. I predict a serious crash within the next few days...0 -
And biggest chances be weekend before exams i bet :thumbdown:0
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