various issues

roi

roi

Bluelighter
Joined
Sep 2, 2013
Messages
1,545
Any news regarding much more pressing issues, such as:

1. "Other Drugs" being a dumpster for literally everything from benzos to meth - bluelight needs more subforums (Stimulants, Benzodiazepines and other GABAergic sedatives, Opioids, another one dedicated to new RCs with threads eventually being moved to more accurate subforums after a few reports come out).

2. "Psychedelic Drugs" either being renamed to "Hallucinogenic Drugs" or create dedicated dissociative and deliriant subforums (I would prefer the latter).

3. SSL cert (ever heard of Let’s Encrypt?).

4. Proper spam filters and moderation tools? I have a new thread feed and see spammers on a regular basis.

None of these are hard to implement and would greatly benefit bluelight.
 
1. we're discussing staffing in o.d. right now and will be recruiting more help soon.

2. this is the first i'm hearing of a desire to rename or reorganize p.d. - can you make your case?

3. we're working on it and we'll be done as soon as sw solve one last issue with the server on which images are hosted.

4. we already receive criticism that our existing spam countermeasures inconvenience regular users too much. i think we have the balance right and there are no plans to change our approach at this time.

thanks for the feedback.

alasdair
 
1. So your solution is more mods in OD, but no additional subforums? For steroids for example there's a dedicated forum already, despite not receiving high traffic. Dedicated stimulant, benzodiazepine and opioid forums would be bigger than that!

Shouldn't "Other Drugs" actually exist for stuff that doesn't really fit elsewhere, instead of covering 80% of all drugs? If someone is interested in let's say stimulants, right now they have to go to OD, scroll through 500 unrelated benzo, opioid, cannabinoids and various RC threads to find what they're actually looking for. OD is just way too big for a single subforum. Moving at least bigger threads (say 3+ pages) to more accurate subforums wouldn't take that long.

2. Hallucinogens are a class of drugs that consists of psychedelics (usually serotonin receptor agonists), dissociatives (typically NMDA receptor antagonists; atypical dissociatives include k-opioid receptor agonists and D2 receptor agonists such as salvinorin A) and deliriants (muscarinic acetylcholine receptor antagonists). PD currently accepts all three subclasses, despite two of them not being psychedelics. The correct name should therefore be "Hallucinogenic Discussion". Apparently that was discussed in the mod forum in the past, you should take a look there!
 
honestly, this will be easier if you drop the sarcasm.

i never said that the solution to every problem was more mods but the forum is understaffed so that has to happen before we can consider the next step.

i'll talk to the p.d. staff about p.d.

alasdair
 
Sorry if I appeared to be offensive in any way, it's just...especially the OD issue has been around for years, and no one seems to be interested in improving the situation, despite the resolution being fairly obvious. I mod a few forums myself with > 40000 unique visitors every day, I know how much work it is, but I also know that it's certainly possible.

If you decide to give a dedicated RC subforum a try, I'm more than willing to help out with that.
 
the o.d. issue has been around for years because it's been discussed a number of times and the bl staff has always decided against splitting the forum. that's quite different to nobody seeming interested in improving the situation.

alasdair
 
Well in all seriousness I don't feel there's enough disso/deleriant traffic to warrant creating a separate subforum for them. In doing so we would require a new set of moderators as well. The traffic through PD is more than some other subforums but not enough to make it difficult for the mods there to deal with.

I personally would rather leave PD as PD, dissos and deleriants included. I feel like you're just getting caught up over semantics here, most of us who mod and post there are already pretty into dissos too, and well... deleriants don't come up often in the first place. It seems to me like the most befitting place for those substances still.

If it's really a big deal for everyone else, we can rename it Hallucinogenic Drugs, but splitting it isn't something I will back.


That's my opinion on the matter, but I don't speak for everyone, we'll see what others have to say.
 
Splitting it would in ways make sense, but given the relative traffic those specific things generate, I don't see any need to bother removing them from PD. Regarding the subforum's name, I'm not too fussed. I also see the sense in that suggestion, especially if keeping dissociatives and deleriants in PD.
 
Yeah, PD probably shouldn't be split and just renamed instead.

However OD definitely needs to be split up.
 
^I can understand wanting to rename it. Perhaps we should hold a poll?

I also just feel like saying "HD" instead of "PD" would be lame, but I know that's not a rational reason to fight a rational change hahah 8)
 
I would love to see OD changed from a dumping ground - I have a particular interest in novel psychoactive substances but not even close to the time needed to wade through OD for this. I really feel it puts BL at a disadvantage to other drug discussion forums when it comes to NPS. I think that is evidenced by new substance threads in OD dying so quickly. I would also be happy to support moderation of an NPS subforum, though I would prefer drugs to be classed by activity rather than novelty. I would be happy to help moderate a stimulants subforum.

I don't think you'd need more than a couple of new mods to support a split to "Stimulant discussion" and "Sedative discussion". That would at least massively improve the scope of the forums.

I would LOVE to see something as simple as a keyword filter for the @ symbol. 99% of the times I see this in PD it is because a spammer is posting their email. You could do this, turn off the existing spam "filter" and it would be twice as effective.

I think the PD namechange is the least pressing issue here (despite being valid). I'm sure I've seen it discussed before though.

I would much prefer PDD (shortened to PD :p) "Psychedelics, Dissociatives and Deleriants", since in my experience the term "hallucinogens" is used by researchers in ivory towers and journalists who have no understanding of what it classifies. I do not want to reinforce the use of this term as being interchangeable with "psychedelics" among us too, since psychedelics is a big big part of PD.
I do not think a split would be necessary/useful.
 
I think my vote is to leave PD as it is. I can see the logic in splitting off dissociatives but there is so much crossover, and I think it works the way it already is.

Also I agree with the term "hallucinogen" as described above by my esteemed colleague... to me "hallucinogen" is a throwback to a time when the activity of these drugs was not understood at all, a throwback to the time when LSD was considered a psychotomimetic, as if psychosis and the psychedelic state are equivalent.
 
[MENTION=35021]alasdairm[/MENTION] So what do you think about opening a few more subforums? As you can see, it looks like some people here would love to help out with it. At least one for stimulant and sedatives each would be incredibly useful, and imo one for RCs as well.

About the PD name, it looks like the word hallucinogen is a bit disliked here, however as Transform said "Psychedelics, Dissociatives & Deliriants Discussion" sounds good.
 
i am going to defer to the od staff on the sub-forum issue and to the pd staff on the forum name.

this process is going to take longer than any of us would like so get used to that :)

my main operational focus right now is getting 4 new senior moderators on and up to speed on forum oversight. when that's done, we'll have two new smods overseeing od and i'll ask them to manage revisiting this issue.

alasdair
 
Then the one remaining issue that I'd say is really important is that please please can we have an email address filter?
 
you mean a feature to stop people publicly posting their email addresses?

alasdair
 
Never seen someone do that (normal users posting their email) in PD. It's always fresh account vendor spammers.

Like, what's the point of posting your email on a forum with a message system? And why would anyone publically post it? If anything, such things are to be shared in PMs.
 
alasdairm said:
the o.d. issue has been around for years because it's been discussed a number of times and the bl staff has always decided against splitting the forum. that's quite different to nobody seeming interested in improving the situation.

alasdair
Click to expand...

There's no need to split OD into a billion sub forums - especially considering all the poly drug addicts on their laundry list of heroin+meth+GHB+benzos+47 RC drugs+caffeine+nootropics...

And the madness continues.

It makes more sense to keep things the way they are.
 
You sound like DARE. The overwhelming majority of drug users are not addicts. Especially not poly drug addicts. What the hell...

What you're doing is called psychological projection. I expected better from a senior moderator.

Also 3 != 1000000000.
 
I think splitting OD into a number of sub forums makes a lot of sense. I find it a nightmare to wade through all the posts looking for what is of interest to me. So much so i usually go and look on other forums with more clearly defined areas. Apart from that my only other major gripe is when trying to edit using Bluelight mobile (on Android using Chrome) it deletes my post. This never used to happen but has been a problem for a while now.
Otherwise no other complaints. You guys do a fantastic job of management of this site.
 
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