As you may all be aware, the user known as Digg Bot has been wreaking havoc in the various lounges:

IT Professionals' Lounge
Software Developers' Lounge
Linux Users' Lounge
Network Administrators' Lounge
Windows Users Lounge
Mac Users Lounge

The total flood of links that are already available in a convenient directory on the web (surprise, at digg.com) has quashed the actual conversation and interesting debate that used to take place in these forums. Digg Bot should be banned from the forum for spamming.

If you agree, make yourselves heard.

+1 that thing is destroying our hangouts.

I disagree. I demand unconditional surrender. There will be no treaty.

you heretic. We'll let you Dig that bot's grave.

For those of you not aware, the Digg Bot is an actual legal DaniWeb bot. The idea is to syndicate the latest related front-page articles on Digg and encourage DaniWeb's community to comment on them.

I've noticed that the lounge forums tend to engage in very interesting discussions but often need that single person to start a thread and give that push to get conversation flowing. I thought that populating the lounges with a synopsys of the latest Digg articles might just be that push.

Completely ignore the flood of articles that all shot in at once initially. From now on, there should only be a handful (about 5) of new threads per forum per day, so they won't seem to overrun the forum at all.

Another reason for throwing them into the lounge forums is that because many users have been confused as to the purpose of those forums. They're not support forums ... and to hang out people post in the Geek's Lounge, so what's the purpose of these lounges? There's been a somewhat erratic mix of off-topic banter and support questions for people too lazy to choose a more appropriate forum. So the goal was this might help push the lounges towards a set purpose of being a place to discuss various issues.

I must confess, I hate diggbot. Way too much fluff and nonsense. Maybe put all posts into one daily thread per category instead? That way it is all contained and organized and we don't have dozens of useless threads clogging our forums and our search results.

Here's the thing. The whole flooding thing was completely accidental. The Digg Bot is not going to be making more than 10ish posts per day across all 7 forums it posts in.

It looks like this was a failed experiment. The hundreds of posts made all at once really tainted things. It wasn't supposed to happen, but ... eh

If we have another go at it, I need to rethink using Digg as the source, as well.

Dani, if you plan things before you do stuff then these things wouldn't happen (joke)

But yeah, I didn't particularly warm to the idea of a bot (or whatever it is) starting a topic of conversation for technical discussion. It seems kinda faux pas.

But I dunno, some of your kooky ideas have kinda grown on me.

> Dani, if you plan things before you do stuff then these things wouldn't happen

There was a weeklong discussion going on in Area 51 including three successful days where the bot was confined to its own forum in the IT Water Cooler.

> But I dunno, some of your kooky ideas have kinda grown on me.

Oh yeah? Like what?