Philosophy Now Forum

No, they come from many IP addresses. We do also have ways of blocking particular IP addresses, so if the spammers all came from a small number of addresses it would be much easier to stop them. We have blocked a few addresses that seemed to have particularly large numbers of spambots.

Up to a point, yes it has. There are many spambot postings every week that never see the light of day on the forum because of the setting system. We look at them , realise they are spam, and kick the spambot off he forum. I think without the vetting system this forum would be completely unmanageable...

Dan Dennett then wrote us third instalment, bringing his story up to date:
https://philosophynow.org/issues/70/Dan ... phy_Part_3

I'm posting this now for the saddest of reasons: I just read that Dennett passed away earlier today.

An update. Bora thinks he MAY have fixed the speed problem but we'd appreciate your help in spotting any unexpected side effects of his cure. As Seeds and Gary pointed out, there are absurdly high numbers of visitors to the forum much of the time at present, presumably most of them being bots. Bora ...

Just a test post

Many thanks! The thing about the v high visitor numbers is worth knowing. I think Bora also spotted this. It does sound significant.

It works for now. The entire Philosophy Now website was running slow for about 2 or 3 days. Our esteemed webmaster Bora eventually narrowed down the problem to the forum, but we're still not sure of the nature of the problem. Therefore he took the forum offline for about a day to investigate. The re...

I don't know the answers to most of your questions. Bora might know some, but he's busy working on an upgrade to the Philosophy Now app.

"Guests" are people who are on the forum reading threads, but who are not logged in at the time. They may or may not be forum members.

Welcome to the forum.

I agree with you about the pineapple on pizza. However, then there always seems to be ham involved too, and I'm a veggie, so that's a problem.

Hi there, I'm the Admin (and the publisher of Philosophy Now). Please do tell me about it here. Next time I'm here I'll check this thread to see if you have posted. Generally when somebody joins the Philosophy Now forum, the first post they make has to be approved by a mod before it becomes visible....

Bora asked me to let everyone know that he has just updated the forum software, and hopes this MAY solve the problem of connections timing out. But if not, please do tell us here. If that didn't fix it, we'll have to try something else.

No, I wasn't aware of this. I haven't encountered the problem myself - the forum always seems to load fine. We have a pretty good setup in terms of servers for Philosophy Now magazine and the Philosophy Now Forum, so capacity really shouldn't be an issue. I'll ask Bora, our tech genius, when I talk ...

Happy New Year everyone!

(OK, I am a little late.... sorry)

Hi folks. I'm moving this to the Philosophy of Religion section of the forum.

Not sure what was going on there. Substance abuse, as he said himself? He could have been joking, but maybe not. Anyway, he has been perma-banned.

Never a dull moment, is there?