Need to be serious for a minute.

Hey everyone.

This post isn't going to have my usual happy energy. Actually, it's going to be rather serious. I'm not just an administrator of this forum, I'm also an active user of it, and last night my user self saw something which my admin self should now address, as it made me very uncomfortable.

Some of you may have seen a post asking if you can tell a certain food won't meet your sensory needs just by looking at it. Some of you may have replied to it, myself included. And some of you may notice that today, it's gone. Hopefully you're all aware of the ongoing battle against spam and scam posts on the forum.

Going into this, there were a few things I wasn't fully aware of, which I'm learning about and getting better at. Professionalism, accountability, asking NDSA what's okay to do and what isn't BEFORE I do it. Engagement bait-and-switchers, if you will.

Hopefully we all know not to engage with these shady posts in any way. Don't reply, don't contact the account, don't click the post or any of its contents. But it seems that occasionally, we fall for it.

The sensory needs food thread was posted by what looked, at a glance, like a legitimate account. It was a legitimate question, with a legitimate answer from the poster. It looked like a legitimate person, one of us, accessing our safe space to join our safe conversations.

Last night just before bed I decided to check the forum one last time for shady new posts. I was very unhappy to find the sensory foods thread had been changed from the original question into yet another spam post. Usually I just ban all the account's IP addresses, then the account itself, then delete the post and move on, but this was different. It was personal, manipulative, almost intimate in a way. It made me feel like, instead of trying to drop the junk at the front door, they managed to enter the house and leave it on the living room couch.

I did manage to revert the thread, but it still felt wrong, so I deleted it outright. I'm sorry to anyone that interacted with that thread, I'm sorry its value is lost and I'm sorry that this is seriously a thing that actually happens.

I'm not sure I need to say I'll do better next time, since I didn't really do any less than my best and I definitely did nothing wrong. This is the first time this exact thing has happened to me and it was very unsettling, so I suppose this whole post is just me talking through it, sharing with you all, reaching out in case anyone else feels this way about it.

It's not the first time it's happened in this forum though, and it won't be the last. We will keep up the good fight and continue working to keep the forum clean!

Let's pick this up with some good news, shall we? I got some feedback on my Ultimate Blue theme, and now for all 3 Ultimate themes you may notice the contrast of the text when you click yourself in the top right is MUCH better! I'm thinking of adding some new colours soon, and if I do I'll let you know!

Thank you so much for reading this whole thing, here's a bowl containing a treat of your choice for your efforts! 🥣
UnicornSpoon 🦄🥄💚
 
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UnicornSpoon said:
Good christ I had no idea you guys really feel this way... I'll try and talk to Marie about ways to stop the spam and scammers, if not from joining the forum then at least from seeing or posting anything.

UnicornSpoon 🦄🥄💚
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Hi UnicornSpoon,

I’m incredibly grateful for all your efforts.

My Autistic life is all about managing my anxiety and level of threat, real or imagined. Like many Autistics I feel that the more information I have, the more understandable the world is and I can predict more accurately what is going to happen. I’m hopefully then going to avoid the bad stuff.

I’m not a digital native. I grew up in a time of computers running on data entered on punch cards! When I see that malicious people have managed to post who knows what on areas of the site, I am reluctant to use it. I no longer see it as a safe space.

My perception may well be wrong, but until someone can convince me that an area of the site is secure, I’m not going to post on it. If they have breached the defences in one area, how long before they gain access elsewhere. The information we have received to date is to report spam and not click on links. What would convince me of the site being safe is that spammers and scammers don’t continue to post.

Because I don’t understand what is going on, my default position is to stay where I think I’m safe. This is a shame and it means that once again I miss out because I don’t feel safe due to malicious people targeting us.

The forums are so important to many of us. It’s where we can communicate in our preferred way and get so much of our validation and support.

Please don’t think this is any kind of criticism of you, it isn’t. I just wanted to tell you how this Autistic feels and operates in this world and the way that influences the way I use the site. You have way more knowledge and understanding of the digital world than I will ever have. Perhaps you can convince me that the spams and scams are nothing to worry about.

Thanks

Wade
 
Camel said:
Hi UnicornSpoon,

I’m incredibly grateful for all your efforts.

My Autistic life is all about managing my anxiety and level of threat, real or imagined. Like many Autistics I feel that the more information I have, the more understandable the world is and I can predict more accurately what is going to happen. I’m hopefully then going to avoid the bad stuff.

I’m not a digital native. I grew up in a time of computers running on data entered on punch cards! When I see that malicious people have managed to post who knows what on areas of the site, I am reluctant to use it. I no longer see it as a safe space.

My perception may well be wrong, but until someone can convince me that an area of the site is secure, I’m not going to post on it. If they have breached the defences in one area, how long before they gain access elsewhere. The information we have received to date is to report spam and not click on links. What would convince me of the site being safe is that spammers and scammers don’t continue to post.

Because I don’t understand what is going on, my default position is to stay where I think I’m safe. This is a shame and it means that once again I miss out because I don’t feel safe due to malicious people targeting us.

The forums are so important to many of us. It’s where we can communicate in our preferred way and get so much of our validation and support.

Please don’t think this is any kind of criticism of you, it isn’t. I just wanted to tell you how this Autistic feels and operates in this world and the way that influences the way I use the site. You have way more knowledge and understanding of the digital world than I will ever have. Perhaps you can convince me that the spams and scams are nothing to worry about.

Thanks

Wade
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What Wade said. Absolutely all of this and very grateful for your efforts Unicorn Spoon.
 
Sigh. The problem is there's only so much I can do. These are human people bypassing the CAPTCHA and coming onto the forum, and we just don't have the resources right now to do anything more... robust.
 
Hi UnicornSpoon,

Yes, we know and appreciate all your efforts.

Can you just reassure us that the mentors and mentees forums, which so far are unaffected are pretty safe as you vet all the people who have access and it is only if one of them proves dishonest that we’ll have problems. Presumably they would be readily identified and chucked off.

My other post was just to let you know how the digitally ignorant Autistic (me) might feel and the way they would likely react to a perceived threat as you indicated that you had no idea this is how we were feeling. I know this wasn’t out of any lack of regard for us. As you know so much about these things you probably understand the risks so much more clearly and know how to keep yourself safe.

Wade
 
Camel said:
Hi UnicornSpoon,

Yes, we know and appreciate all your efforts.

Can you just reassure us that the mentors and mentees forums, which so far are unaffected are pretty safe as you vet all the people who have access and it is only if one of them proves dishonest that we’ll have problems. Presumably they would be readily identified and chucked off.

My other post was just to let you know how the digitally ignorant Autistic (me) might feel and the way they would likely react to a perceived threat as you indicated that you had no idea this is how we were feeling. I know this wasn’t out of any lack of regard for us. As you know so much about these things you probably understand the risks so much more clearly and know how to keep yourself safe.

Wade
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Hi Wade,

YES, I promise you completely NO ONE has access to the mentor/mentee forums except for actual mentors and mentees. Everyone has to sign up for it separately from the forum so it takes extra steps and it can only possibly be legitimate users such as yourself. The spammers don't even know it's there.

Also I just want to throw this out there, I'm pretty sure the spammers don't care wat we're actually saying around here. They just come in, dump some crap, and then they just sit on it too. I've banned A THOUSAND spammers and I've VERY rarely seen them entering existing threads. The ones that DO post in multiple threads, they do it so fast I can't imagine they're taking time to read. They genuinely just have nothing better to do than waste our time and energy.

The spam posts themselves are like mouse traps, they're ugly and they keep appearing and they make us nervous, sure, but they don't actively harm us unless we start actually clicking things like media or links inside them.

Please rest assured, this forum IS safe, it just gets a lot of... visitors... but we just blow them away with a happy little ban hammer!

Thanks,
UnicornSpoon 🦄🥄💚
 
Thanks UnicornSpoon, this is the information I needed to hear to reassure me.

The mindless antisocials that do this stuff simply don’t understand the effect their activity has on people. My mother in law got scammed out of £40. Nothing in terms of the amounts that other people have lost. She didn’t just lose money, she lost her confidence in using the online services which we all take for granted. She’s afraid to click on anything…..even the safe stuff she used before. She lost her self esteem and felt stupid for having fallen for a scam.

Anyway, thanks again for all your efforts and your reassurance. I agree most of what I’ve seen is so obviously not what we talk about in our posts…….but it does make a hypervigilant bunch like us nervous in a place where we want to be relaxed and info dump!😁

Wade