As the "official" BookLikes group has been swamped by unchecked waves of spam, I've decided to create a replacement group for us to address the issues that we'd otherwise post in the "official" group:
Since it's member-managed, it of course won't cause any issues to actually be fixed. But let's face it, with BL admin AWOL, that's not happening anyway -- and this will at least give us a new place to discuss issues and voice grievances.
Most importantly, being a member-administered group, this will be a group where we will be able to keep out the spammers.
In light of this, it would be helpful if there were several other administrators besides me, so if you're interested, please let me know.
My hope is that we'll eventually be able to dry out the playing field that the spammers have found in the "official" group. There hardly seems any point for any of us to remain in that group but for the few threads that remain useful to us, and ultimately it makes more sense to me to move those threads to a new group that we ourselves can control and leave the "official" group behind once and for all. That way, we'd not only remove thread views from the spammers own statistics -- we'd also be spared seeing their threads in our notifications and at the top of our own dashboards. I don't think this will entirely get rid of the spammers (nor does removing them from our "friends" lists, after all), but at least it will be one more way of making BL at least a bit less welcoming to them.
To get us started, I've replicated the five most important ongoing threads from the "official" group in the new group:
* BL Members' Non-BookLikes Blog URLs
If you want to add any further threads, feel free to do so -- just please keep it to threads that are of interest to the community as a whole.
Happy blogging all and have a great weekend!