No disrespect to the family of Damilola Taylor, but I’m not sure why the BBC have deemed this (“Porn posted on Damilola web forum“) to be a newsworthy headline story? The forum in question only appears to have ever had 1 legitimate thread since it was set up and only a couple of non-spambot members.
The news item was posted on the BBC site 2 hours ago and the hard-core links are still there. In fact, porn links from several days ago are still there. So…
- How long should it take an “administrator” to delete half a dozen inappropriate forum posts?
- Why are they running a version of vBulletin that has known security holes and is over a year out of date? (in fact, it looks to be been nearly 10 months out of date when it was installed)
- Why did they choose to set the forum up so that spambots could register and post articles straight away?
- Why not just take the forum offline until you can clear up the offending articles?
- There are thousands of message boards and forums out there with porn spam links on them posted by automated bots — what makes this one newsworthy?
Please, BBC, stick to reporting real news.
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answers to the above questions:
1) a couple of minutes at the most
2, 3, & 4) because the person administering the forum is clueless
5) because the BBC News Editor on duty this afternoon is clueless
Since posting this, I notice the inappropriate content on the forum has at least trippled. The main reason why that has happened is because of the high profile news coverage by the BBC.
Talk about a self-fulfilling prophecy!
Sadly, I can only assume that Mike Jervis (chief executive of the Damilola Taylor Trust) is one of those people who believes that there’s no such thing as “bad publicity”?