Older blog entries for redi (starting at number 201)

badvogato, are you suggesting we should convince the spammers to stop their pathetic attempts at SEO and to become Free Software developers instead?

That would certainly be consistent with the goals of advogato, but I'm not sure it's practical :)

I didn't say the system was ideal, only that it worked. I consider it unfortunate that hjclub's account was deleted. I did try to convince hjclub that certifying the spammer was a bad idea. I don't know if hjclub read that and I don't know whether the spammer's cert was dropped by hjclub, or as a result of hjclub's cert being dropped.

recentspam, episode 94

Since Zaitcev's posting atai lost his Master cert, as a result of a new Apprentice cert. atai responded by removing hjclub's Journeyer certification. I didn't see which order the events happened in, but the spammer and hjclub have both been deleted, probably marked as spam and deleted by other users as soon as they lost their certs.

That might be unfair to hjclub, but the community's response to spammers, and anyone who helps them, is pretty clear. Simple as it is, the self-policing system worked to defeat spammers again. 8191 is right that it would struggle if the spammers weren't utterly incompetent, but so far that hasn't been a problem. Maybe the intersection of SEO spammers and people with half a brain is an empty set?

The diary entry by humaurtumonline is gibberish, quite possibly the output of a Markov chain. hjclub asks "why shouldn't I cert him as a journeyer?"

From the Advogato FAQ:

the purpose of the trust metric is to certify that a given user account on Advogato is known by the Advogato community to actually belong to the individual who claims it and is known to be a member of the free software and open source community.

There is no reason to suspect that user has any involvement in free software, certainly not deserving a journeyer cert

8191, we have ways of defending ourselves :)

The "flag account as spam" system works pretty well, and the SEO spammers are too stupid to realise that observer's posts have nofollow tags and are not indexed by google. It takes more than that to compromise Advogato.

P.S. Aryson Young is a lowlife spammer.

I haven't posted much recently, but I've been pretty busy adding C++0x support in GCC and helping resolve some of the Library Working Group issues list. My changes to std::function caused some regressions when combining it with std::bind, so it was necessary to finish the rvalue changes for bind as well. I also rewrote most of <future>, and have just checked in an implementation of std::condition_variable_any. GCC 4.5 is shaping up to be quite an exciting release for anyone interested in C++0x. IMHO Jason Merrill deserves special mention for his work on the g++ front-end, he seems to be adding new C++0x features as fast as he's fixing long-standing C++03 bugs - great work!

8191, if diary replies don't appear on recentlog then it's not possible to follow a thread unless you keep visiting the top post that started the thread. By following recentlog you see the replies, even if they are jumbled up among lots of other unrelated posts.

Otherwise, keep up the good work!

Last week I added rvalue support to std::function, so that you can invoke it with move-only types such as std::unique_ptr. That will be included in the GCC 4.5 release. Doug Gregor originally contributed the <tr1/functional> implementation that it's based on and it's really cool stuff. I continue to be in awe of Doug and the other authors of Boost.Function and Boost.Bind.

I'm still wrestling with std::bind

Comagan Suresh, the lowlife SEO spammer, is still creating accounts here. My previous post calling him a lowlife spammer is currently the 3rd and 4th google hit for his name. Stick that in your SEO and smoke it.

Come back and visit us again, fzort - or syndicate relevant posts here please.

An SEO spammer has created several accounts today, all with real name "comagan suresh". It's hard to know whether to tell search engines that Comagan Suresh is a spammer and lowlife, or whether it's someone else trying to harm his reputation. Oops, too late now.

I've just noticed mentifex recently wrote a rebuttal to an old article, where he refers to himself in the third person and calls advogato "a major battleground in the conflict between censorship and freedom of speech." I fear if he does herald the technological singularity then the future is going to be like getting spammed by a Dada Engine with a persecution complex.

Wow, a whole site dedicated to removing all the joy and humour from xkcd.

caolan's diary entry makes me wonder why people in large C++ projects like OOo still insist on managing memory the hard way. If cppcheck (a simple pattern matcher) can find those problems then the bad/missing delete must have been very close to the new so there's no reason it couldn't be wrapped in a smart type that would clean up automatically. I dread to think how many memory-related bugs there are in OOo that can't be detected by simple pattern-matching.