on YouTube:
Hear, hear!
Had the same thought when one day I looked up Action Retro. He was talking about using a Haiku laptop as a daily driver when all of a sudden he switched to talk about a shaving lotion for men and thanked his sponsor!? THAT and the sensationalism that goes with it is what drives me away.
I find a good indicator is to see if the video preview has a photo of the author in it aka attempting "brand building". This verifies the "sales approach" versus the wish to spread information for me. If you want to see for yourself what I mean, look up Retro YouTuber "65scribe" and YouTuber "ActionRetro". Spot the difference?
on attachments:
It's been some time since I've dabbled with the admin settings of SMF, but I vaguely remember there was an option to allow only *registered* users to view attachments. This is not 100% solution, but I assume it'd not only provide a reason to sign up, but also keep the bots spidering this page constantly from grabbing documents?
on editing posts:
Maybe an extended period of time might be a compromise? Raising it to a few hours or a maybe a day? Otherwise I second the fact that this will likely be used by an enraged member to delete / obfuscate prior posts. You wouldn't believe how many people upload stuff to the Mac Garden and then rage delete them for whatever reason.
That sucks to hear about Action Retro. I never bothered to check the guy out, but now I feel even more sore that some years ago he wound up with the MDX (MDD/Xserve G4) daughtercard I helped an electrician build and acquire parts for with dual 7448 2.0GHz processors, which he built as per my request, but that the postal office in the US was being a huge pain in the ass about with shipping it to Germany for some unspecified reason, and so the package was returned. And, without telling me, the electrician eventually sold it off quietly (which is somewhat understandable as I was quiet for some time, too).
Incidentally, that's
the most powerful and capable G4 and Mac OS 9 machine in the world, even more so than Sonnet's MDX dual 7447 overclocked at 2.0GHz (due to it being 7447 instead of 7448, which has twice as much L2 cache, 1 MB per processor instead of 512 KB, and for running cooler / more stable usually), and better than non-MDX equivalents because MDDs have better specs than the QuickSilver and earlier models.
I wish it had at least fallen into good hands...
Also, people rage-deleting things in the Garden? Yikes, what a shame that some people would be shitty enough to even consider, let alone do, such a thing. How does the Garden staff prevent such calamities? I know the files can't be "deleted", but how to detect if threads or old posts got "butchered" / deleted / censored? Are they all eventually restored, or is it all manual labor and manual vigilance?