Now that the mass email has gone out, I’m going to wait a few days for former CADForum members to reconnect before opening the site up to the general public. If you know someone who needs immediate access, send me a private message with their email address and I will send them an invite link.
Are Discourse instances vulnerable to ‘AI’ bots scraping?
They are wreaking havoc with quite a few projects web presence.
(FOSS infrastructure is under attack by AI companies)
Might be something to look at before opening the site to public?
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The CADmunity Discourse instance is behind a Cloudfare proxy. All traffic goes through Cloudfare which handles things such as DDoS attacks. Cloudfare also has an option to block AI bots, which I have enabled.
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A closed forum would be better imho. it is a professional forum for professionals looking for answers.
The effort put to register is minimal, and it could help to filter unwanted persons and keep the quality high.
my 2 yen.
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I tend to agree.
Looking at the feces fest that is r/solidworks, it’s nice to have a forum where every other posting isn’t either a software compliance officer e-mailed them, wanting free tickets to a CSWP exam or needing help with their homework…
cheers
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Reddit’s SolidWorks area is indeed terrible. A lot of students wanting you to do their work. And some general noob questions that are so basic that I don’t think they’ve had any classroom or training or any CAD experience at all. Does anyone even try to google anymore? Let me drop into the woodworking reddit and ask “How do I get started working wood?”
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I think what you guys are speaking of can be achieved here easily with moderation without having to make the place private.
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Agreed with Alex.
…and Jason, why bother searching when one can just ask. It’s the whole twitter/facebook/swym mentality.
There can be some minimum number of hoop jumping before new user allowed to post, that’s normal and expected anymore.
Maybe we want to add to the community rules that the group will not answer home work questions or questions that are already answered in the FAQ. Then when the topic get’s canned by mod that rule can be sighed as the reason.
I went through the into message with discobot, it’s not that bad. I don’t know if it’s possible but maybe add a step that guides them through noticing the automatic similar topic search when creating a new topic. I’ve tried a few now since the import and it’s finding threads from CAD Forum that are decent hits.
As for allowing the good search bots and blocking the parasitic AI bots, that sounds like a bigger problem.
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Just the sign up requirement might deter a few. Many people already have Reddit accounts so posting to any reddit is easy. Maybe ask a few basic CAD questions to get started…like
- What does the CAD acronym mean?
- Name 3 CAD software programs?
- What is a blueprint?
If you can’t bother to google the answers, maybe you shouldn’t be posting.
Yes. Granted if they find it worth while a bot could be set up to do that and provide AI answers.
If there’s a way to have a group of members review these requests I’d be willing to help if needed and considered competent to do so. I don’t think one person should have to do all of that.
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My $0.02… A forum like this lives or dies by the questions asked, and the visibility of its quality answers to good questions. If it’s not visible/searchable from the outside, nobody new will find it while trying to find answers to their interesting questions and they won’t come here to ask them.
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Discourse has the concept of trust levels, for the purpose of preventing new users from doing harm:
Flagging posts is another way to keep the S/N ratio high, and everyone at TL1 or above can do that. All the CADForum users that were migrated are already at TL1, so keeping things clean is everyone’s job. The flag system is pretty sophisticated as well (e.g. tracking whether of not people doing the flagging are ‘good’ at it). Gory details here:
Additional moderators will only be required if things escalate beyond my ability to keep up.
Every user also has complete control over what they see. You can ignore and mute other users, and it’s as though they don’t exist.
As for ‘dumb’ beginner questions, how many questions about Discourse have I answered in the past couple of weeks that could have been answered by a Google search? The answer is ‘all of them’ because that’s how I found answers to any that I didn’t know.
As @josh says, the most interesting questions often come from left field. The goal should be to get quality posts from CADmunity showing up in search results in order to draw the attention of new and experienced CAD users alike.
The only way to know if opening the site to public view (you would still need to register to post) is going to cause headaches is to do it and see what happens. We’re just unlocking the door, not taking it off the hinges and burning it in the front yard. We have the tools to deal with problematic posts/users but we all have to do our part.
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I like that you added the word, “interesting”. Well said.
I think however CADForum was managed would be a good template. The noobs would show up once in a while, but it wasn’t anything like what I’ve seen on reddit.
Interesting questions are what keeps the knowledgeable users coming back. If there’s nothing but “how do I run SolidWorks on my Mac” we get bored.
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We are probably all guilty there to some degree. Although in our defense, this isn’t a Discourse based forum. I did spend some time searching the Discourse Discourse for “tips” and “how tos”. It seemed to turn into “see your local discourse admin for changes” 
.
I would like to point that I see the “private” forum as a way to avoid the admins to be overwhelmed by requests. @JimSculley is doing all the job using his time for free and it is not that he works 24-7 for us exclusively.
Trust levels and other settings could be also fine for me as long as the forum can live on.
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Just for reference, the CADForum site was open to everyone to read, but I believe there were certain functions that required registration, such as searching, direct messages, and a few others. I never had any moderators, although at times it would have been useful.
The most actual work for me was deleting spam registrations. As I’ve told @JimSculley separately, people would register with some stray url link in their profile somewhere that went mostly to a minecraft server or other random (and usually) Russian linked sites. The spam registrations out numbered the legit ones by about 8:1. I couldn’t block by country or by IP because there was always some spoofing or proxy involved, and I suppose there are probably legitimate users in Russia.
The setup period is full of learning curve issues for both users and admin, and @JimSculley I’m sure knows that there is plenty of backup available from trustworthy sorts here, should he feel he needs that.
I’m really grateful that there was the desire and will to keep the idea of an independent CAD forum going. I think this “platform”, if I can use that word, has much more potential than the phpbb. Much thanks to @JimSculley and whoever else is behind this for taking the steps to make it happen. 
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I have this huge urge to chip in even thought I have been basically inactive for more than 18 months. Well… it is what it is…
I really really really much appreciate having a classic-style forum since those are treasure troves of knowledge. Next word I have had to look up: ephemeral. Discord which is really popular these days is mostly ephemeral… everything disappears in history without proper topics/threads as in classical forum.
Im still pissed of to DS for killing the old forum.sw, but I also am in the impression that they had to move on to something since the back end there was no longer supported or something. SWYM is still just a mess I will not poke even with a three yard stick (though I cannot fathom how much is “3 yards” being the SI-lover I am…)
My thank yous to Matt for holding the flag up high setting up and running the CADforum. Thanks Jim carrying the flag forwards.
It seems the field of 3D CAD has been widening evermore with these past few years with new competitors popping up. I really miss the times having to work as a 3D modeller (/“design engineer”).
[edit: typos]
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I was ok with them moving on to something newer. But trying to reinvent the wheel by shoe-horning a forum in their platform is not efficient. They could’ve easily used this Discourse site to host a forum.
Anyway, welcome back. Are you still doing any CAD work or moved on to something else?
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