Visvanath Ratnaweera

Hi Sinthia

Has it never occurred to you that the barriers you are systematically putting up could be a major cause of the severe decline of forum posts? I'm a frequent visitor and the trouble, in part, I was experiencing is documented in the Moodle community sites forum. From what I observe from the others, even the most long-time and reliable regulars have resigned.

I know the nuisances like scraping content, recently multiplied due to AI. I maintain a couple of servers, one is a state-of-art dedicated server with a thick pipe to the Internet. Do you think there will ever be a "solution" in the sense, you set it and the game is over? Definitely not, it is an ongoing fight, or a game, whatever you call it. It is like the new police chief who wants to mitigate all potential crimes and go on vacation!

We all like to sleep well, especially during holidays. The bad news is that the global village has no short term clock: days, nights, weeks, holidays, etc. don't exist. Only seasonal fluctuations, and the unevitalble long-term drift.

Edit:

 

 Even this post I tried to send four times always got this error. Finally started a new browser, Brave instead of Firefox, and posting again.

Hi Sinthia

What is the "situation" you are talking about? I see only about 5 forum posts per day coming through - genuine and spam combined. The effort you all are putting, is it worth for this meager outcome? At this rate you can freeze the site, make it read-only, without making much of a difference. 

Even that may not be necessary. Send the people to AI. There agents must have sucked the knowledge in the forums and in a position to provide "prompted" answers without the people having to read.

There are all kinds of flags you can set in the config.php. For example:
// When working with production data on test servers, no emails or other messages
// should ever be send to real users
// $CFG->noemailever = true; // NOT FOR PRODUCTION SERVERS!
//
// Divert all outgoing emails to this address to test and debug emailing features
// $CFG->divertallemailsto = 'root@localhost.local'; // NOT FOR PRODUCTION SERVERS

Reg. config-dist.php next to config.php.

Hi Don

I know, you asked Tim for clarifications, which I can't give. But I was dragged in to this as an affected user and it still, a full year later, keeps two of us busy. I am talking of What is the state of the duplicating questions in Moodle 4.5 LTS? and the many related discussions.

 

Caution: I am not 100% sure whether the method Harada san described would clean the mess what I am talking about or any other similar discussions. Over that year many theories, tracker issues, repair methods,.. came up in the forums and the tracker. They never completely solved - neither reduced the number to a realistic value nor purged the broken data. I can go back and find those many other discussions and tracker issues - if it serves any purpose.