Invasion by Idiots!

I don't know. I did try pressing the 'report spam' button on a few posts the other day, but had an e:mail bounce back and say that the message was undeliverable. Most of the other forums I belong to have volunteer moderators who are able to remove spam.

I am reluctant to post on this site as it seems to be targeted by spammers and (potentially) malware messages. Maybe I'm paranoid but it seems security of this site is questionable, although I confess to not being any kind of expert.

There is one moderator at least, and that's Dawn, the website manager. I did help with moderation for a short while, and we managed to remove a lot of spam from the Forum, hopefully before you all saw it. The hope was that spam would become less of a problem with the new site - this seems to be true of the Forum. The blogs, though ..... There are still issues there (I didn't moderate those on the old site) and while I have added a blog post in recent weeks, I have to agree that I'm going to avoid it until the glitches are ironed out and the ****** spammers squelched forever. I don't think there are any/many dangers to users of the site whose anti-virus protection is adequate - I post a lot on the Forum, more rarely in the Gallery, and while I've received spam messages and emails of doubtful provenance, they're really not hard to spot - provided you don't go clicking on links in emails, and don't click on them here unless you're confident that you know where they're coming from, I believe the risks of malware to be negligible. I wouldn't be put off. I have never yet found a website that was totally free from spam - you can do a lot to limit the automatically generated stuff, but if someone signs up to be a member of a site and then deliberately posts the sort of rubbish to which reference is made above, all you can do is weed them out and ban them by IP address: and even then, they can come back in other guises. The moment you open a site up to public participation, you run this risk - and there's just no way of avoiding it entirely (that I know of). There has to be vigilant moderation; but do remember - Dawn is not an IT professional, and is learning how to manage the site at the same time as those of us who use it: she's way ahead on some things, but will freely admit she has a lot to learn about other areas of the site where she relies on external professional advice. The Artists Publishing Company is not a huge operation with legions of staff to fall back on - if it helps, and of course if I could actually do it, I would happily help with moderation again, as Dawn knows - I'm not sure that she knows how to help me to help her at the moment, though! But Dawn, if you're reading this - you have only to ask if there might be anything I could do; I'm sure the same would be true of many people; and I hope you'll be the complete Webmaster in due course, and able to put all spammers to the sword (which is the least they deserve). For the rest of us, I would say - persist. Of course it's annoying when Fifa Gold or whatever it is pops up AGAIN, but there are millions of people in the world and an awful lot of them have internet access: if only a few of them have nothing better to do than infest other people's websites with their tat, that's still potentially a LOT of people. You can only do your best to weed them out, you'll never be 100% successful in so doing, and it would seem the only way to be entirely sure of avoiding them is to have a closed membership - ie, you can't join, or post, unless invited. That's somewhat draconian, and would require policing.

Incidentally - the best way to protect or build any website is to employ a 15 year old geek to cast his (usually) or her (occasionally) eye over it. Don't leave him alone while he does it, of course - this would be fatal, and compromise the site beyond all hope of recovery. But sit with him, provide him with coffee and nibbles, and he'll sort you out. The little horrors take to it like a duck to water. They will sneer at you condescendingly of course, and make remarks like "of course you didn't learn this stuff at school back in the OLD days", if they're feeling generous; or just grunt if they're not. But this is a small price to pay for a site that actually works.

The only bit on the site I tend to look at regularly these days is the forum and it looks as if even this is now firmly in the doldrums. No comments at all posted yesterday and so far today only three spams (apart from Pat's comment about them that is) - well, putting a Sepp Blatter spin on it, I guess they help break the boredom .

There are fewer comments on the forum just at the moment, but then attendance here has always been a bit irregular - even on the old site, there were regular complaints/points made about the dearth of new people commenting. I agree that it's a bit quiet though, and would post a bit less myself if others would come in and contribute: now there's an incentive! Michael, you don't mean you're not looking at the Gallery, though? You're missing an awful lot if you're not - the images are much clearer than they used to be, and would certainly benefit your paintings. Looking at it earlier, I reflected that the standard of posts is now challengingly high - this is partly because I think the standard is constantly improving, which, while a bit frightening, encourages us all to improve our own work, and partly because the new format makes the best of good paintings (and reveals the worst in bad ones, but we have very few of those - and "bad" is the wrong word anyway: inexperienced would be more accurate: thin paint, applied without much confidence, is that bit more obvious). Clearly, Dawn and her technical support are having a fight with the blog page at the moment - there are signs of combat, though, which is encouraging - and I think there was an assumption that attacks in the past were all or mostly computer generated and random: I never believed that - they're made by people who have actually signed up to the site, and no amount of capcha codes or more elaborate signing-in procedures are going to have any effect on them. Other means are required - which are unfortunately labour-intensive.... But once they've got the blog page sorted, the site will be better than the old one - it's just taking a bit of time, that's all.

I agree Robert that the gallery does show a heightening in standards of late and that less experienced pieces are more apparent. I must say however that it's not always skill levels that excite me but also originality in subject matter, palette, etc regardless of the experience level of the artist. Yes I must get back to spending more time looking at the gallery and also back into the habit of posting which I've not done for a few weeks.

Don't agree with that - actually, I disagree on two fronts, the second being that you (Thea) don't have huge skill levels: you have more skills than you seem to realize, and if you know me at all by now you'll know I'm not one to flatter. I don't think that there is any incongruity between skills and vision, which is almost, if not quite, being implied here: I do however think that if you don't have some technical ability you lack the means to express whatever your vision might be. A poorly-composed picture, badly drawn, thinly painted in nervous strokes - to take an extreme example, because we're not often seeing these faults in combination at the moment, although we have in the past - is not going to convey what an artist wants to convey; and I think you will inevitably care about the standard of work, experience, skill level etc, because without them you're not going to look twice at a painting and it will fail to grab your attention at all. The corollary of that of course is that a painting which is hugely skilled, highly technically competent, but either soulless or at least incapable of speaking directly to you is not going to arouse your enthusiasm just because what's been done has been well done: it's what's done that matters. There have been a few such paintings, though not many, lately so far as I've been concerned: very clever, very competent - but somewhat unengaging; anyway, they didn't engage me, that's not to say they might not have appealed to anyone else. It's the photo-realist work that particularly turns me off. The thing about technique though, is this: it should not be the first, second or even third thing that strikes you about a picture - so far as possible, it should be unobtrusive. It's probably here that we DO agree, and if we do that renders the disagreement a minor one or even non-existent - I suggest that if you respond positively to a painting, it HAS got good technique by definition even if it also has its fair share of errors, crudeness, even clumsiness derived from the speed with which the paint was applied. An academic work will often leave me colder than yesterday's chips, for example, whereas a rapidly executed sketch can bring an idea alive. You will be very lucky, or very innately talented, if you can achieve the latter without a fair old body of expertise behind you. To take your own work, which is inspired by Charles Reid, you know, however skill-free you consider yourself to be (bet you don't really!), where to apply the wet colour to make it bleed into another; you know not to overdo the water in relation to pigment, so you avoid back-runs (at least where you don't want them); you know that in your style of watercolour painting (as in many others) it's extremely important to reserve white paper; and you know, among many other things, not only not to mix your paints to death but how to avoid doing so. That's a vast amount of information tucked away in your brain before you even pick up your brush - without it, you wouldn't achieve the results you do: your paintings would be splodges of washed-out paint, wayward washes, tones that didn't read properly and probably wouldn't exist at all, all resembling the bottom of an old fish-tank. So, we need to increase our levels of technical ability and skill not as ends in themselves but because they enable us to say what we want to say. We might fail to say it even then, but without the support of those technical accomplishments - I don't believe we really stand a chance.

I think we agree, basically - it's partly a matter of interpretation of words. Eg, to manage back-runs - which I, an occasional painter in watercolour, find very difficult - is a considerable skill: perhaps the more expert one becomes, the more routine it is, the less one realizes how much of a skill. If you can master it, it must make and does make a huge difference to your paintings, because it gives you so many more options. You can only use the words that are in your vocabulary, arrows that are within your quiver .... but the more you have, the better equipped you are to make an impression.

1st post, and dragging it back to the original post. I'm a forum moderator with one of the world's biggest guitar sites. Over there, a new forum user's first 5 posts have to be approved manually by the moderator team. We've found it works well, allowing us to head off a lot of rubbish at the pass, including politics, religion, counterfeit football shirts, porn, kitchens, sunglasses and so on. Me, I've always wanted to be able to draw. I started trying more seriously a few years back when I turned pro as a musician following redundancy from the Investment Banking Industry. I sketch; one day I'll get it right