Temporary Block Nebula?

Hello, this is nothing personal and a lot of other people have noticed the strange posts by Nebula.

Wether its drug related, or an auto sentence generator, its starting to get a neusense. If you look at the work logs now, there are quite a few garbage posts by Nebula (he made 6 yesterday alone):

http://www.blitzbasic.com/logs/logs.php

We all don't mind a few odd characters around here, but it looks increasingly like some kind of spam-bot, or at the very least, a spam-man (if that exists).

Can the admins look into this, as its starting to affect the userbility of the worklogs?

Block the most entertaining poster in the forum? Mind if I vote "no"? ;)

This isn't really a 'voting' thing, I just would like the admins to look into it and see what they think. Your welcome to your opinion though :)

Well, you have to think about how long this will go on for - he could fill the worklogs with nothing but garbage if allowed to continue.

Maybe they make more sense in Dutch :-)

lol, it is useless garbage, though some of them do tickle, like this:-

Stamp the feet and listen. The thing that you are looking for makes a familiar sound. Home in the sound. And you will find what you are looking for.


Not often you here wise words from someone who is obviously off their rocker! :D

The problem is - how many is he going to create? This time next year there could be hundreds.

If it was just him messing around then fine but this has been going on for months.

He dissapeared from the forum for a while then came back posting all this stuff.

Oh well! I would think that the mods know about him anyway so it's up to them if they want to limit his account.

I hope they don't limit his account.

However, for some reason I don't think that his craziness is the product of a bot, which is a little worrying. I personally think that he's developed either a mental imbalance or a drug problem. I hope I'm wrong. I'd much prefer his "oddness" to be the product of a bot.

I wonder if anyone knows how to contact him in order to clear this up?

I find his posts quite amusing, but if he's going to continue posting tons of different worklogs full of garbage to the extent it overuns the list of worklog entries, then he's becoming a nuisance.

i remember some one being barred and not alowed to return "till he had proof that he was seeking psycological help" or words to that effect

cant remember who it was years ago

Dutch, eh? That may explain things.

Was that paranoid Dave - the guy who wanted to destroy the world with an army of robots (or something like that)?

Well, i've posted some stuff that was slightly off topic here, and it was pretty much deleted right away. Quite rightly, as it was nothing to do with blitz, or games/tech in general.

So, the rule should stand for everyone. It's just rubbish.

Yeak man, it was him.

I can believe you guys haven't heard about the internet 'bots' that used to invade blogs like crazy a year ago..
Users would seem to write seemingly coherent posts, but they didn't make sense in the end. This is because the bot find random sentences from pages on the web and combines them in a way that looks like a human could have written them.

In short, suspend Nebula for disruptive behavior and open up again when he emails Mark.

What's the point of such a bot?

Of cause I have heard of bots, read my first post :)

I don't think this is a bot, however, as spambots usually go after the larger opensource blog/forum systems (reason why I won't use phpBB again), so the programmers can use the bots they make over a wider area.

The blitz forum is quite low key, and its a custom build, so someone would have to build a bot specifically for this forum system, and never be able to use it on any other site.

Either that, or Nebula has programed his own spambot just for this forum, which is a rather horrible thought.

"Nebula" is in control of the worklog posts. Bot or no bot - he is in control of it. In fairness, he doesn't post much in general - it's just those Worklog posts that need controlling.

I recall he held up a conversion when he was on about stardust and someone asked was he on drugs and he replied he wasnt. So he was there in all his funkyness.

It's taking the michael. He's posted another 2 liner since this thread began. Clearly he's not working simultaneously on all these incoherent half-baked ideas, so he's just spamming.

Nooooo.... not meeeeeeee!!!! ;)

perhaps if it was one member one worklog it wouldnt be so bad
he could have a worklog with thousands of 'odd' posts but it would take up one line in the list and generally be at the top with yet another daily post ;)

dave sounds familiar ... but as ive been away for sooooo long (not prison btw) and people have left and some changed their names ive lost count

Haha sorry Dabhand didn't mean to scare you!

Yeah good idea GT... that would give a good balance of freedom/lack of irritation.

I dunno. If he's smoking something then he needs to lower his intake a little.

I don't think his worklogs are of any use/benefit to anybody. You'd get more sense out of a conversation between Rain Man and Manuel off Fawlty Towers.
I'm on it.

"Mork calling Orsen.... Come in, Orsen....."

As JustLuke suggested earlier, some of Nebula's posts look like the result of some kind of psychotic break caused by schizophrenia or some similar condition. If that's the case, we should probably be trying to encourage him to see a doctor about this issue. Nebula has been a valued member of this community in the past (assuming it's the same person who used to post a few years back).

But I do agree that his posts in the worklogs section need deleting, and he probably needs banning until he sorts out his issues.

I agree that he used to be a valued member as he was always helping out noobs and me in the beginners area way before BMax even surfaced.

I just don't know what to believe has happened to him. Either it's some schizoid effective disorder or he's just pranking about on the forum.

Some people seem to enjoy his posts though, JustLuke to mention one, so for entertainment purposes maybe the mods are just leaving him to it.

See, the thing is, Amon, although I do enjoy his posts, I think that something needs to be done about them. If they're a bot then they need to be removed. If they're symptoms of a mental disorder then they also need to be removed. However, they shouldn't be removed until the mods know exactly what's going on. If Nebula's posts are legitimate (rather than symptoms of mental ill-health) then I say let them stay.

Well I think his posts border on illness. It doesn't take anyone smart to realise that somethings wrong.

To me he appears to have lost the plot. Whether it be because of drug use or legitimate mental health problems I think he should not be allowed to post until he sorts himself out.

I will say though that he could just be getting high on drugs and going on a postathon.

I viewed some of his posts and it seems he started loosing it about a year ago. Maybe he's become so advanced human being that he is way past us and he's using language in ways we couldn't comprehend? Either he's a genius of he has a mental disorder. Or it's just a huge prank. Not workings of a bot, I think.

there have been some normal Code archives entries from Nebula recently.

The thing is that we are not a mental health charity or support board, this is a support forum for a commercial programming language.

I would say that none of us are qualified to help him if there are deeper problems, and if the sole justification of allowing him to continue posting these things is for our 'entertainment', then I think that is quite a bad state of affairs. Leaving him to post might do more harm than good, both to him and the purpose of this site.

1)


Man, GfK, Please never get banned again. Your spontaneous comments like this keep me cheery!




and 2)

I agree with Boomboom. it is not the mods job to keep a track of someones mental health or even care about it at all. If there are people here kind enough to look into it then so be it, but why should BRL concern themselves with it bar a banning until contact (by contact I mean an email that actually makes sense.)

Of course it could just be a wind-up. If he is loosing it, a ban is the last thing he needs. He's not causing that much hassle yet.

That's very strange, his posts in the code archives are logical and well built. Something weird here, isn't it?

Maybe he's using the Blitz forums as a means to pass on secret information to foreign governments in the form of nonsense posts.

Perhaps puki should spend a while looking more closely at the posts ;)