What maker-related Google+ communities have you been a part of? Are there others that we should perhaps offer to port here?
We have ported the 3D Printing (23,000 posts!), ChiliPeppr, DIY CNC, GCodePrintr, HercuLien, K40, LaserWeb/CNC, OX, R7, reprap, and talos communities from Google+ to here.
Unless Google breaks something else, we have a few more weeks in which to port additional content here. Please name additional Google+ maker communities of which you are a part and which might be valuable to continue here, so we can investigate. (A link to the community would be ideal, since it’s entirely possible that there are multiple communities with the same name.)
I have to be able to join a community to archive it, and My plan is to archive communities as soon as they are identified as reasonable candidates for import, and work on additional imports into this site in a few weeks, closer to Google+ shutdown.
We will start by creating categories or subcategories if/as appropriate (usually subcategories) and asking people to join, and then we’ll import content closer to the Google+ shutdown.
Update 16 March: Google currently appear to be actively blocking the exporter, so the time for nominations may have passed. Continue to provide any, and if the problem is resolved I can consider additional ports.
In general, my main concern is any communities that are choked with spam. I spent hours cleaning up the DIY CNC import. And Discourse never throws anything away, so every spam image we import is disk space taken forever. So I glanced at that list.
I have to be able to join a community in order to archive it. The latest (1.7.14) release of the exporter removes this restriction. I can archive public posts from public communities without joining.
Arduino Projects I joined, I’ll look at it. …6174 posts archived. Looks like there’s lots of spam though, so on hold for now.
Cohesion3D This one is for @raykholo to decide. I have an archive already.
FabCreator I have an archive of all but most recent posts. I don’t know who to ask there; do you know who to talk to at FabCreator about it? I can definitely do an import if the owner/mods don’t object, but if they are doing their own thing I don’t want to create confusion. Update: imported; note that FabCreator has its own discourse thogh.
TinyG Motion Controller I joined, I’ll look at it. Update: 102 posts total; that’s easy. Done.
Shapeoko I’ll look and see how clean it is. Very clean, very little spam, import complete.
Embedded Microcontroller Projects I heard back from moderator that spam cleaned out, so I’ll plan to do this one. It’s bigger; 73000 member community and 7871 posts. Update: on hold, looks like more than 50% spam.
Microcontroller Based Projects This one looks choked with spam. Thinking probably not.
ESP8266 Ported
Opensource CNC Ported
@cprezzi are you willing to help review identify spammers by reading through piles of JSON? If so, I could work with you to add a filter to the front end of this process to elide all posts/comments by known spammers before import. I can do the import to my system ASAP and we can migrate content even after G+ closes, so it’s not an emergency priority thing.
Yes, that’s probably easiest. It would be the numeric IDs not names though. I could load a list of those IDs in the script and drop entire posts and comments by blacklisted users during the import process.
@whackyhack They are 3d printers! Just with very very small Z!
I added that user to the global blacklist I’ll use for future imports here.
The Ares community import is complete. @whackyhack go ahead and announce on the google group including that google logins — the same login for Google+ and google groups — should give people access to their old content. You may want to associate @whackyhack and @whackyhack so that you own all your content there without having to change logins; your call.
Oh, wow, the ESP8266 community is choked with spam. I went through and identified what looked like spam to me and it cut out about 1/3 of the posts, and (as it should) very few of the comments. There are just over 1000 posts in the community, and I process 1000 at a time, giving two summaries:
Glancing at the Embedded Microcontroller Projects community now. [Update: so far, apparent spammer filtering is over one third of the posts. A lot of both spam and astroturfing in there.]
If you get me just a list of user URLs (feel free to PM it to me), one per line, of spammers who have posted to that group, it’s pretty easy for me to add them to my blacklisting. A blacklisted user’s posts aren’t included (nor any comments on their posts), nor any of their comments, and they won’t be able to post on this site without a moderator enabling them. In the meantime, I started downloading an archive.
I identified spammers and astroturfers in Embedded Microcontroller Projects only back until January 2017 — and probably not all of them, it is mind-numbing — and I’ve already cut out 40% of the total posts for all time after moderation. This is not a spam-free community. Given progress so far, I’m guessing it’s greater than 50% spam.
No. At this point I’m going to quit throwing good time after bad. This list of spammers will apply to any other import I do, but it’s just not worth the effort.
I’ve offered the 27MB of JSON and the existing black list if anyone wants to take this on. (I was hanging around the house sick so wasn’t feeling super productive anyway.)
I already have the JSON, but I’ll take the black list. Do you have a tool/environment to be able to test view content from the json, in a form that helps with the filtering?
We can pull the community into an Ares subcategory of 3D printers. I started an archive job. [Update: archive complete]
and it cut out about 1/3 of the posts, and (as it should) very few of the comments. There are just over 1000 posts in the community, and I process 1000 at a time, giving two summaries: