The popular Imaginary AZ thread is back up and running. Feel free to resume the game now. https://whowatchesthewatchers.boardhost.com/viewtopic.php?pid=593#p593

Most of the site that can recovered is back so folding in the posts from Please Help With the Move:

Andy E. Nystrom
1/07/2020 3:27 pm
The more hands on deck, the faster this will go. If you can help, PM me your email address and I'll send you threads to format. Will delete things from this list as threads get posted.

OHOTMU Sightings - Historical Version -rplss working on
Omniverse Map - zuckyd1 working on

Plus most threads started on Capes (Optional) (e.g. later Guidebooks) will need to be recreated from scratch.
 
Andy E. Nystrom
1/27/2020 3:18 pm
Still need help with most of the above. To avoid burnout and to catch up on other things, for the next little while I'll only devote Thursdays and up to one other day a week to moving stuff over, though all week I'll still be available to assist others who want to help with the move. When I'm more caught up with other things I might go back to helping with the move additional days of the week.
 

I just did the first ban on the site, user Claudetit. They joined and started a new thread "I'm a new member!!!" and then proceeded to post new-[series of letters and numbers; possibly some sort of code]. They then repeated the exact same post 13 times. There was no link so I don't know exactly what they were trying to pull, but it was still a spammy thread that contributed nothing to the site, so I banned them and then nuked the weird post. New members are always welcome, including people who just want to lurk, but you start a new thread and just repeat something that doesn't make sense over and over, I'll assume it's some sort of spambot activity.

Here are some thoughts of improvements I'm thinking of: folding Prose Books and Music into Other Pop Culture. There's only one post in the former and none in the latter. Also merging Movies and Television. There's only one post under Movies, and there's a lot of potential overlap between the two. All these would reduce the amount of scrolling needed to see the entire page. Also creating more sub-sections for OHOTMU General (one for separate handbooks, one for separate indices, etc). This would reduce the extra that an older handbook, etc got buried.

What are people's thoughts?

zuckyd1 wrote:

I definitely like the idea of more OHOTMU subsections.

If I did so there would be two ways I could go about it. One would be to create a sub-forum like Indices to the Handbooks, which has a link on the main page, but isn't separated out in Last post. The other would be to put them on the same level as the Imaginary and Non-Marvel threads. The benefit to the former approach is less scrolling on the main page. The benefit of the latter is there would be a greater range of posts where you could see the last post on the main page. I'm leaning towards the latter at the moment because I like seeing more of what was updated recently, but if people would prefer less scrolling to see the various sections, that also works.

I streamlined the Other Pop Culture section as promised. I also played around with the colour a bit but most changes didn't look so good so I reverted them back; the one change I did like was changing the blue bars red. If you have other colour suggestions for various portions of this site, let me know and I'll try them out.

I'll give splitting up the main section another week to find out what people's thoughts are.

Further to the above, here are the categories I see for the main reference section, in order:

Individual Handbooks/Files Books (including trades/hardcovers). New Handbooks pinned until at least three months after publication.
Raw Data (Master List, Sightings, etc.) Master List pinned, Unofficial Index to the Handbooks will be a further sub-sub-section of this.
General Information (material that doesn't fit anywhere else): Q&A thread pinned.
Official Marvel Indices (including trades); putting below General for now as there are no known current plans; I can always move this category up as it becomes active again.
Imaginary Threads and Wish Lists (as these relate to hypothetical Handbooks and entries it makes sense to put with the other threads, but as these are not real, these go below most of the other. A-Z thread pinned.
Non-Marvel: Put last because it's not official Marvel works. As this expands it could warrant its own section separate from the Official Marvel stuff (maybe DC and Everything Else), but with only 17 posts it's not worth splitting up further as yet. Non-Marvel Handbooks pinned.

I made the changes! It took less time than I thought since I defaulted to individual handbooks, the category with the most threads. To find the new location, do a search on the main page or go into the Individual section and check the Moved redirect link. Some threads could go in more than one category so post any suggestions for different locations here. Hopefully this will make it easier to spot recent discussion.

If you saw a now deleted thread started by Zelenatpg demanding to know where the Admin is, that user is no longer here. I was already suspicious because I don't exactly hide on this site, so because I have access to his email address I did a search. The one result, in another language, was a threat starter elsewhere promoting a casino, followed by people posting links and thanking him for the info. That was all I needed to know.

We're starting to get a lot of spambots, so in the next few days I'm going to require people to answer a simple question to register. This won't affect anyone already registered, just new registrations. I'll let people on the Facebook group know that if they want to register without answering a question to do so in the next few days.

I can now verify that registration questions work well. Spambots are unable to properly list any of the above and just answer the questions with their usernames or variations thereof. It's possible we might still get a few bots due to previously registered bots, but as they get pruned out there should be no further issues there.

Letting people know we might still get the occasional spammy messages. it appears that spambots play the long game and one I just removed registered back in April. In the next week I might PM the various people who haven't posted yet to try to clear out bots.
 

I have just finished PMing users who I am not sure are legit. If you don't have a private message, I already know you're not a spambot and you don't need to do anything. Otherwise, the message has instructions on letting me know you're human. As noted above I won't prune any account for three weeks (unless of course we get spammed).

As I anticipate that I will end up pruning approximately 3/4 of our users, I am doing two things to further promote this forum.

First off I've created a separate email for correspondence specific to this board: whowatchesthewatchersohotmu@gmail.com. People are welcomed to email me about this board at any time. Given the mishaps we've had in the past I recommend people save that email so that if the board crashes, you can still reach me.

I've also created a Twitter account to further let people know we're here and to push key discussion such as when a new Handbook comes out: @watches_who

PutinBiz... that sounds legit 

The Thanos snap has now happened and all users I was unsure if have been removed. If anyone feels their account was removed in error, simply re-register naming a comic, TV show, and movie, and you will be permitted to lurk as long as you'd like. as I'll know you are human. Due to the possibility of removing users in error, I did not ban anyone just now.