Current state of forums - Neglect, spam and blocking genuine participation, can someone from .org team help?
This is not a new issue, but something that (sadly) has been around for a long while now. The forums hosted at developer.jboss.org have been constantly spammed and in general the forums themselves have been neglected. Genuine activity/participation in the forums has drastically decreased over the years. To give you an example of the kind of content (spam) that the forums currently attract, take a look at the attached screenshots which are from the "Recent discussions" and the "latest content" widget/pages. All spam (except a thread or two)!
The more worrying sign is that there seems to be absolutely no one (other than community volunteers) with the right set of control (i.e. Jive admin related controls) from the .org team, who seem to monitor these forums and nip this spam in the bud. The community volunteers occasionally mark these threads as spam but one can't expect them to be able to handle this amount of spam on their own.
In the past, when I was employed at Red Hat, I had raised this issue numerous times and the jboss.org was helpful enough to add a very basic spam filter to the forums. Unfortunately, that has helped only marginally and in fact on many occasions caused problems to genuine users (see these threads for what I mean One post per hour Disable Frequency Limit Rate Limiting).
If you look at the current bunch of spam, it's very clear that it's a scripted attack (take a look at the timing on the posts). I am a moderator in one other very popular Java forum on the internet and that one is fully driven by volunteers including managing the servers and the software. Yet, we have far better control on spam. In fact, you hardly find spam in those forums because we nip them in the bud with various tools and more importantly with the intention and dedication of keeping the forums active and lively with genuine participation. I find it hard to believe that these professional forums at jboss.org, overs these past years, have constantly allowed this kind of spam to continue, yet at the same time haven't addressed concerns where genuine participation has been blocked.
Could someone from the .org team please take care of these issues and get rid of spam and at the same time allow genuine participation to continue? Hopefully someone from the team is allocated to keep a watch on activities like these on a ongoing basis instead of someone from the community constantly bringing this up every few weeks.
