A language learners’ forum

The search button has suddenly disappeared, and when I click "New posts", I get a message telling me that I'm not permitted to use the search system!
Why?

This is because of additional restrictions which had to be put in place to stop spamming. You can either use Google to search, or when you become a full user (after more participation). I apologize for the inconvenience, but it was necessary to keep our forum spam free.

Hash wrote:The search button has suddenly disappeared, and when I click "New posts", I get a message telling me that I'm not permitted to use the search system!

For what it's worth, as a user with many posts, I can use the search function just fine... I don't know what the minimum is, but just taking a wild guess I imagine it might be 10-20?

Querneus wrote:

Hash wrote:The search button has suddenly disappeared, and when I click "New posts", I get a message telling me that I'm not permitted to use the search system!

For what it's worth, as a user with many posts, I can use the search function just fine... I don't know what the minimum is, but just taking a wild guess I imagine it might be 10-20?

We don't actually say, since we don't like to give spammers more information about the site settings. But it isn't difficult to get to the minimum with a little valid participation.

Hi, new user here. When I am logged in, there is no search button, but if I log out it appears again and I can use it without any problem. Is this the intended behaviour? Currently I am logging out each time I want to do a search, which seems a little counterintuitive.

WillW wrote:Hi, new user here. When I am logged in, there is no search button, but if I log out it appears again and I can use it without any problem. Is this the intended behaviour? Currently I am logging out each time I want to do a search, which seems a little counterintuitive.

Once you have become a regular member, all will work as advertised.

I have noticed one curious consequence of the change. I maintain a series of MSWord files with my own contributions to the forum, and normally I have just copied them from Firefox into Word. But this time the images were lost in the process (though for some reason not the smileys). Then I tried Chrome - same result. Then my trusty old Explorer, which I keep on my machine because it's the one that my photosystem is made for. I had not logged in there, and then I saw the message mentioned above about missing rights - but I logged in a the two other browsers, so missing rights alone can't explain the change. That being said: if I log out from the forum on Firefox, I can not even see the active threads, let alone do searches - so WillW may have a newer computer, ah dunno. I had not noticed this behaviour before because I always log in when I use the forum.

I use Edge on my (relatively) new laptop, but there I haven't got Word (I use Libra Office instead) so I can't replicate the experiment there. Any way, the solution for images is to cut them from a screendump so I can still make my archive files, and I never publish video links in my own messages - but I'm puzzled as to how a change in the rules for searches for new members can have such effects on my system.

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Some Firefox 113.0.2 observations regarding being logged in vs. not logged in:
Active topics - "Sorry but you are not permitted to use the search system."
Search bar isn't visible at all.
Images in posts - "You do not have the required permissions to view the files attached to this post."

I think this change has to be reconsidered. Maybe it is just on older computers that you can't search the system or see the latest posts without being logged in, but even that's quite problematic because it effectively will limit the number of people who want to become members and write things here. And if the block also hits new computers and phones then we're toast (especially since you risk being logged out unless you remembered to mark 'remember me'!). When potential contributors are blocked from using the system at all until they already have an account then they won't make one, and then we will end up as poor old HTLAL - alive, but devoid of activity. We can already see that the number of posts per day has fallen, and below a certain treshold even existing members will stop checking in. As for the problem with spam we can discuss methods to fight it, but the question is what will do most harm in the long run - spam or death by suffocation.

jeff_lindqvist wrote:Active topics - "Sorry but you are not permitted to use the search system.

Pretty annoying, as I'm used to reading the forum without being logged in.