Sorry folks, but the amount of registration spam is out of control and one of the things slowing down the blog. I’m going to purge everyone who doesn’t have at least editor level access tomorrow, and you’ll have to re-register with the new captcha system. Sorry about this, it’s not elegant, but I’m hoping it makes the site run faster, and cuts down on my admin overhead.
On edit: to clarify, this shouldn’t effect people who an email subscription, just people who log in at the website proper, usually to comment. That’s very few people compared to the overall audience.
Celsius 233
Erm, seems normal so far…
Lisa Simeone
Testing.
S Brennan
This is just a test
S Brennan
With the flood of articles being issued by the various propaganda ministries on;
“Massive Immigration; Were Doomed to Eternal Darkness Without it”
I’m just tossing this in:
http://www.fastcompany.com/3015616/the-shocking-stats-about-whos-really-starting-companies-in-america
To – The Shocking Stats About Who’s Really Starting Companies In America
“What do these folks* all have in common? Each of these serial entrepreneurs who founded companies that have market caps in the tens or hundreds of billions–employing tens of thousands of workers–were…”
…brought up in the upper/uppermost strata of their respective societies before they immigrated to the US and were able to arbitrage their advantages in the emerging internet and from the money that flows to Silicon Valley…whose economy was developed entirely with US taxpayer funds and research.
While the article is an unvarnished emotional appeal for the immigration bill to pass using the “Propaganda Ministry’s official party line [OPL] for “smart people”. OPL 17.07.689 “Americans are now lazy, worthless, scum and deserve all the bad things that we do to them for our own trivial amusement”
In reality, all these people could have come to our shores under the most restrictive immigration regime imposed by the US…based on their sheer wealth/parents alone. When it comes to immigration, wealthy go where they want, conflating these people with the pending bill is pure sophistry.
The immigration bill as it stands is a vote to increase by 4X’s the indentured STEM workers used to replace Americans entering their late 30 thru 50′s. Remembering, that about half of all US engineering grads never even get their first STEM job, it’s already a flooded labor market. Plus, the bill contains a guest worker provision to undercut the wages of those illegal’s who will be given amnesty. In short, one more effort by DC to undercut the wages of Americans…disparity of wealth comes from policies like this.
So what they really have in common isn’t emigration, but contacts, capitol, best educations and that they located to the wealthiest area of the US with these societal advantages…and did well. The article then asks us to ignore these facts, [actually, they fail to mention them] and instead we are asked to believe that there just “something special” about immigrants. We swim in a sea of propaganda.
*Sergey Brin, Pierre Omidyar, Elon Musk, Peter Weijmarshausen, Iqram Magdon-Ismail
markfromireland
Ummmm why do you have registered users who are above subscriber? I’d lock that one down sharpish if I were you. I’d do it as follows:
Administrator – that’s you. It’s a good idea to have one other Admin account with a difficult to guess password in case your account is ever hacked.
Editor – If somebody is not currently an editor then demote them to subscriber.
Author – If somebody is not currently an author then demote them to subscriber.
Contributor – If somebody is not currently a contributor then demote them to subscriber.
Subscriber – somebody who can only manage their profile and make comments.
The thing is that nobody other than those you trust and who you know have secure well defended difficult to hack machines, good unguessable passwords, etc should have anything over subscriber level access and that applies to people who used to be editors, authors, etc but aren’t any more.
mfi
markfromireland
PS: Do you need subscribers? I have a few subscribers mostly because since it was rejigged akismet has been throwing false positives on comments to beat the band. I don’t allow people to register – they have to ask me to register them and I do it by hand. Turn off the:
Membership | Membership Anyone can register
in the General Settings to eliminate registration spam (although I like the look of the anti-spam plugin you’ve chosen)
mfi
Ian Welsh
Should have said above subscriber, I do know the difference, and hardly anyone other than me has access above subscriber, be sure of that.. I was just lazy about this blog, and didn’t deal with the automated registration spam. My bad. But I think it might be one of the causes of the frequent slowdowns, so I figured I should purge. I added a captcha and I haven’t seen any additions since then, so, eh. The subscribers who matter, anyway, are the ones to email and I do that through a different service.
markfromireland
Phew :-).
mfi