Notes on the disaster
The problem you're experiencing, Lakon, is a strange one, although unfortunately too common at the moment. For reasons not entirely clear to us, regular members are getting shoved into the moderation queue;
see "
Why do my posts have to be approved by a moderator?" for more information.
As to getting those posts into circulation, well, normally we go through the queue several times a day. I can't tell you what exactly has been going on for the last few days, but it's best to think of the staff in a hierarchy. There are five
administrators; three are "company" (ownership) men; there is a fourth that I believe is with them, though I have not interacted with this individual who was added to the roster a couple months ago. Of those, Plazma Inferno is our usual liason to the company side. James R is the fifth administrator, and he is our day-to-day, on-site admin—a volunteer brought up from the membership once upon a misty long ago.
There are two supermoderators, myself and Stryder.
We have a roster of moderators who attend specific subfora. James, the supers, and the mods are all volunteers; we do what we can when we can.
The most effective in dealing with the spam issue—which is the underlying problem affecting your posts—are James and the Supers—which is almost a band name—because we have broader system permissions to deal with the various issues that arise. I know Plazma has a lot on his desk at any given time, even if we don't include the spam eruption that accompanied the site software update. We hear from him right now primarily when he has some kind of advice or instruction; whatever other projects he has going on at the office, the spam issue has him frustrated very nearly to trichotillomania. Quite literally, all of our spam guards collapsed with the software update; I had
no idea how effective they were until they were gone.
Most of the volunteer staff are either employed or engaged in some sort of studies. I'm something of an exception in having more free time on my hands than is healthy.
Unfortunately, I was out of town for several days. Whatever else my colleagues got done—and it was considerable, to judge by the carnage—it looks like we suffered an excremental storm in recent days.
All of which comes together to explain what happened to your posts, and those of several other members as well.
The moderation queue tonight was incredible. It took me two hours to clear it.
And, yes, I found and approved the posts that shouldn't have been there. Well, I hope I got them all. I don't think I killed any, though, or else someone has been wrongly permabanned and their posting record damaged if not downright destroyed. And, well, that would be really embarrassing in addition to sucking guttermuck. (Thankfully, there's a cap on how many of one member's posts we can nuke in one shot.)
But, in truth, anyone looking for those posts would have had a hard time finding them. As a supermod, I can carry out massacres; the moderators are considerably more restricted in their capabilities. To wit, they kill spam in small numbers, such as if there are several posts in a single thread. My opening maneuver tonight destroyed over one hundred
threads.
And no, the membership isn't supposed to see those posts; that's what we're using the queue for. (S&S had four pages of threads within the two-week display period; three of those pages were spam. The membership should only be seeing about a page right now, some thirty-four threads.)
But, yes. Over one hundred threads in one shot. Most days, that should be a thrill, because a bloodletting is faster and easier than picking the spammers off one at a time. But tonight it didn't even scratch the surface. Eighty-five threads in S&S, and a smattering spread out across the board. One shot.
Hell, if this was last Tuesday, I probably would have been done.
But then, with the spam
threads killed, it was time to start destroying spam
posts buried in other threads. I can't tell you how many there were. Multiple hundreds—I cannot be more specific because, frankly, everything melts together. I narrowly avoided destroying two of our members tonight. That would have been embarrassing. Although it probably
is embarrassing that I cannot remember who they were. But, yeah. Click the wrong box, miss the name in the kill list, and that would be the kind of problem I cannot fix. (I do confess that in the early days of massacring spam, I did actually destroy a legitimate thread; I'm still quite embarrassed about that, although I managed to not accidentally ban the member who started it or seriously damage his posting history.)
And somewhere in that list of hundreds of spam posts, I found a handful from members that should not have been queued. You, Syne, Gustav, Wynn, and a couple of others.
I can say that after I found the first member post in the queue, I surveyed the list a couple of times before proceeding, but did not actually find your posts until I finally reached them in the kill process.
This is what we see when killing spam:
(And, yes, you read that badly-typed thread title correctly.)
Over three hundred.
Probably less than five hundred. Your posts were lost in that list until we could clear away enough of the wreckage to actually see them.
And despite all that, we still haven't figured out
why member posts are going into the queue.
My (and our) apologies. Had I not been so selfish—
—as to bail on you all in order to see Peter Gabriel in Vegas this weekend, maybe we would have found the lost posts sooner. All hands, such as it is. All hands.
As to Masterov, I do not believe he is actually suspended at this time. You can always check the
Ban List for more information on who's taking a mandatory vacation, and their user title—e.g., "Registered Member", "Let us not launch the boat ...", &c.—will tell you if they're taking a trip courtesy of the staff. Our neighbor does not presently appear in the ban list; his user title is normal; I have no notes from my colleagues in our suspension log indicating any offense or action taken; he has no current infractions (I don't believe you can see that data).
I can't tell you why he thinks he was banned; he can pass that information on to me; or if you have it and it's okay with him, you can send it to me via private message. If there is an issue to resolve, we can figure it out, but I have literally no data telling me that he has been suspended or why.
And that, as best I can tell you, is what's going on. The staff is doing what they can, but it looks like spam has been squalling something foul the last few days. Your posts shouldn't have been queued, but once they were lost in that mess, they were lost until they were found.
