Hi, the forum owner, Brendan, doesn't have time to visit and clean the forum of spam very often. He is suffering in the aftermath of floods in his Australian town, and so there may be more to it than that. But this forum is not just dying but almost dead. What other forum is there? Daltaí was destroyed by Kevin O'Cleary's decision many years ago to crack down on any discussion of Irish dialects, and what was a very busy forum then saw a 99% drop in posts. Brendan made clear here that both the CO and dialects were welcome here, and so this has been a good forum for a long time. I think there are Unilang and some others, but not with the same volume of traffic. Any thoughts?

I posted this at https://www.reddit.com/r/gaeilge/commen ... 3raim_ilf/

I'm "mod" in another forum (with a completely different topic), there is more traffic than here - and more spam attempts. But we prevent spam there through restrictions for new users (no links allowed, posts must be activated by mods/admins). I don't know how to activate such features in the phpBB software - but they exist.

Here is apparently no spam protection at all. That is a pity.

What's the story with Daltaí actually? I find that there's a lot of interesting discussions and resources in posts from the Archive, but I always wondered why was it archived and why did the site basically go dead. I kinda see it as a predecessor to this forum. Why would they want to crack down on discussions related to dialects?

Also best of luck to Brendan!

I quite like this forum - I get a lot of information from you guys. And there's a lot of really useful information in the archive.
I think we likely need some new configurations and mods.

If Brendán sees this (or any of the other mods for that matter), I don't mind being a mod (or admin) at all, I'm happy to manually delete spam every few days.
And +1 for the rules that Labhrás was suggesting.

Kevin O'Cleary didn't like discussion of the dialects, and clamped down on it. There were numerous people in a very busy forum discussing all aspects of it, and then O'Cleary got his way and now there is one post every three weeks there.

I thought it was due to the change of the forum software.
Everyone had to register again. The new user interface is quite ugly, logging in often didn't work (sometimes I had to respond to a confirmation email). I tried to reply to something there a few times, but the replies weren't showing up, etc.

Sorry to take over the subject of this thread, but I wanted to respond to the concerns raised and address the spam issue.

I'm the volunteer moderator who has been clearing out the spam most of the time this year, when I can get to it (it is freshly cleaned up as of today). I believe that I'm the only one doing this, since Brendan has other personal issues to deal with and the other moderators don't seem to be active recently. There are only certain things I can do as a volunteer moderator, and I have to deal with the spammers and spam messages one at a time, so it can be very time-consuming (and boring), especially when messages are inserted into otherwise valid threads.

I'll try to continue for as long as it remains manageable, but as some of you may have noticed, the Gaelic Forum has already become a lost cause, with spam messages arriving in such huge numbers that it can no longer be cleared out by one person. It's also virtually impossible for me to spot valid new queries among all the garbage there, so I've stopped trying, and advised people to stop posting new queries (see my message there). If the same happens with this forum, I'll have to give up trying here as well.

In case anyone's wondering about volunteering as an additional moderator in order to hep, that would be nice, but I have no control over doing that, so you'd have to try reaching Brendan.

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I'm not a native (or entirely fluent) speaker, so be sure to wait for confirmations/corrections, especially for tattoos.

Caoimhín, carry on doing what you're doing! Lean ar aghaidh leis, led thoil -- rud luachmhar an fóram so agus ba mhór an trua é chailliúint....

I’m here every day, lurking about, usually not logging in. Today I just deleted a whole host of irrelevant posts and banned those who posted them permanently. If David and some others who log on here frequently can be upgraded to monitor level by Brendan, things could be managed more effectively.