New Members ⇒ On the Doer of Stuff...

[Julian_S_Moore]

Ah... a place to say Hi! "before posting"... oops

Greetings TeXlings!

I've already admitted in the posting I just made (WinEdt & XeteX) that as far as all this goes I am a complete tyro: I downloaded and installed MikTeX 2.7, GSView 4.9 & WinEdt 5.5 yesterday (on a Vista HP SP1 machine) having never touched TeX/LaTex/*eX at all. I'm half way through "LaTeX for Novices", have read the 1st 76pages of "The Memoir Class" user guide [what a gem!]... and I have got WinEdt to produce a PDF with a few trivial sentences - and that's it. The goal is to typeset a book...

I've been writing this book (novel in prose-poetry; ~250k+ words) for rather a long time (>x years, alternating work as an IT consultant with time off for research and writing) but it's nearly done done now and I'm going to get it printed and bookbound by an expert, but I have to get it typeset first! However despite the - ahem - extensive modifications made to MS Word by VBA to support the writing, the quality of output from Word isn't what it could be. I tried the open source Scribus page layout package for a while, but hit problems and in my first IRC chat to the community one of the developers said "try TeX"... so I am.

I know its going to be tough, but I had to teach myself a lot of Mathematica to produce the illustrations for the end papers (no, no math visible but unexpectedly complex!) so I'm prepared... no, not really, but I'm prepared to be prepared.

Currently living in Budapest - beautiful city, lousy exchange rate... though that's not Hungary's fault - currently sitting at home instead of in the cafe Castro Bistro where I go to write every day... it's a tough life: no income, no nice warm beer (I'm English) - but I do rather like it

So... what next?

Julian

[Julian_S_Moore]

Classic! Write first, think later...

the _S_ stands for Stuff, on account of the fact that elsewhere I go by the name of Julian I-Do-Stuff... because, when people ask me what I do (usually re business) the answer has always been just "Stuff" because I'm not a specialist in anything, I'm an expert generalist so I do anything and everything that seems like fun/earns enough money.

There. Now you know.

[Lucia]

Well, I guess this post from user AbiniDano should be removed. This is a LaTeX community, and there are better places to post such stuff. I'd like to know what our administrator or moderators think about that and if there is a better way to avoid this situation in the future.

Welcome, Julian_S_Moore

Thank you,
Lucia

[Julian_S_Moore]

I used the "Contact Us" link and notified admin/moderator or whoever is at the other end as soon as I received the notification about this "reply"*

I'm not sure how this can be avoided except by moderation...

* I found it offensive - not because of the content per se but because it's an abuse of everyone's time, forum space, flouts our expectations of what is to be found here and frustrates out purpose. I'd object on the same grounds to someone pushing a "petrolhead" website with car pics... fortunately granny isn't interested in typesetting languages either.

Perhaps the poster mistook the idea of "Latex" in *this* community??

Julian

[Lucia]

I got so mad for wasting my time, expecting to see great LaTeX stuff, that I didn't notice any "Contact Us" button...

And I agree with you, it's not about the content itself, it's about wasting our time and frustrating our goals. And I don't think that user mistook the idea of Latex. Anyone reading these posts, even without knowing what LaTeX is about, will understand it is related to computers and programs, and not porn. Besides, that user already posted some more pics.

I also don't know how to avoid this, I don't have knowledge in forum administration. But perhaps using that method of writing some letters or numbers in a box when registering, to make sure there's no automatic registration. Sorry, I don't know how to explain better and I'm not sure if this method would achieve the goal of avoiding this situation.

[localghost]

Well, I guess this post from user AbiniDano should be removed. This is a LaTeX community, and there are better places to post such stuff. I'd like to know what our administrator or moderators think about that and if there is a better way to avoid this situation in the future [...]

This user has been kicked off and all his posts have been deleted. I consider that situation not very critical because it is only a matter of a few clicks to get the forum cleaned from this stuff. But none of us can stay in the forum 24/7. So users should use the report button (exclamation mark) to make us aware of unwanted contents. Some people obviously think that this is some kind of fetish forum or something else and post their stupid stuff.


Best regards
Thorsten¹

[Lucia]

Thank you. I did't realize how to report this until now, that's why I replied to that post.

Lucia

[phi]

But perhaps using that method of writing some letters or numbers in a box when registering, to make sure there's no automatic registration.

This never works, especially when using widespread board systems like phpBB. Any spambot can break those CAPTCHAs.

[Julian_S_Moore]

But perhaps using that method of writing some letters or numbers in a box when registering, to make sure there's no automatic registration.

This never works, especially when using widespread board systems like phpBB. Any spambot can break those CAPTCHAs.

I would disagree with the objection to CAPTCHAs - some are easy, some are good, and some are so impossible not even a human being can solve them.

I'm sure there's something appropriate in the wide wide world of CAPTCHAs

Julian

[...and I finally found the little "i" for reporting]

[Lucia]

This never works, especially when using widespread board systems like phpBB. Any spambot can break those CAPTCHAs.

I would disagree with the objection to CAPTCHAs - some are easy, some are good, and some are so impossible not even a human being can solve them.

I'm sure there's something appropriate in the wide wide world of CAPTCHAs

This is too much technology for me... But I hope it is possible to prevent this spam. The same user registered again and I just had to report his new posts...