For the past year, I've been seeing more and more projects that directly or indirectly promote famous PCB manufacturer services. Since last month, I'm seeing quite a lot of projects that are obvious promotion and are in no way Hackaday projects. I'm quite sure their authors are paid by these companies to promote their services but I have nothing to support my claim. Do Hackaday terms of use tolerate this kind promotion activity?

+1

I wouldn't be half as annoyed if their posts actually provided information or value. Some of them are just rehashes of modules you can buy much cheaper off-the-shelf than making it yourself, so what's the point? One or two are actually dangerous like a transformerless mains dropper. Many are just rehashes of reference designs cribbed from datasheets. Many don't even provide design files to reproduce, probably because it's not the poster's design, they can't actually hack, they just grabbed it from a pool of old designs, as evidenced by the old versions of software used to create the design files. Then after posting a whole slew of "projects" they try to get them back on the front page by editing the project very slightly.

I hear what you are saying. I'll start a conversation about this and get back to you all with an answer. 

Hi Richard. How's discussion progressing? Been already a month and I'm seeing more and more of those advertising projects. Since last week, I'm also seeing pure spam projects.

Agreed. The problem is largely due to YouTube paying content providers about 18c per ad view.
Many very poor people in third world countries have created (or more usually ripped off) very many poor quality project videos.
To get more clicks, they have created facebook member pages packed full of YouTube links, and facebook groups that are packed full of members and their posts. These groups do not have a no-spam policy. E.g. the group "Electronics projects" (
https://www.facebook.com/groups/653362674740718) has an unfeasibly huge 1.1 million members.
It is pathetic and it buries all the legitimate posts in junk not worth wading through.
It looks like they now have their sites set on Hackaday.io. I think the only thing we can do is click the "Report as inappropriate" button and hope the admins can keep up. I'll start reporting a few and see what happens.

I've been reporting those projects since the first time I saw one but recently there is an important number of them and it looks like admins have difficulty to keep up: in recent projects, you can still find "Multilayer PCB at Cheap Prices from JLCPCB" from [Circuits DIY]. I believe explicit advertising/promotion of any kind should be forbidden on Hackaday projects. This would definitely increase admins work load so I wouldn't mind help in this matter.

One measure might be to impose a period based limit on the display of projects that are created or updated. Only a certain rate of updates per <time period> will go into the global feed, subsequent updates are not added to the feed when the limit has been reached. It could still go into the personal feeds for people who are actually interested. This will reduce incentive to make trivial updates to keep their "projects" visible. Maybe there could also be quotas per account, an account could only have so many items appear in the global feed in a given period.

The global feed is a resource that should be wisely utilised. I do think that making it pointless to flood the global feed space, while not censoring the content for people who are truly intested in the project or the account, will make the site more useful.

Like Facebook, this site allows you to like material with a thumbs-up emoji, but not dislike material. Maybe hackaday should have dislike with "thumbs down" emoji, and "really hate" with a poo emoji. The latter would let the poster know it isn't welcome, and alert the admins to abuse.

Related is the issue of more and more electronics and related industries trying to get attention by posting announcements or news some thinly disguised as user guides. They have some value to those who might want to hear of new products, but only to a select audience. Perhaps a section of the website should be designated News which registered members can opt-in to follow. It shouldn't be possible to post there directly, but moderators would reclassify posts and "projects" to move them there.

+1

In some instances people even copied part of my blog. I reported several cases but never received feedback and I am also not sure whether anything happened.

The topic of the "guerilla marketing" campains are often PCBs, where it is quite transparent and still somewhat acceptable. There is also a lot of content from "neopixel"-competitors who want to promote their own products. This is often less obvious and open. Generating Youtube traffic, like mentioned above, may also be a topic but I had not noticed it much so far.

We're aware of a handful of users that are basically copy pasting content from other sites. The content is primarily intended to either build backlinks or create referrals. Although it doesn't clearly fall under our terms of use (unauthorized advertising/spam), it also isn't being posted for the benefit of the community. I'd rather it be very clear what isn't allowed. I'm going to be publishing an update from legal, contacting accounts, and then move forward from there.

Thanks for your update. If, as a Hackaday member, I can help with something please feel free to let me know. 

Richard, not intending to put pressure or sound impatient but any update? I'm sure you've confirmed by yourself that projects just aiming to promote PCB manufacturers keep increasing and recently there was even a project reviewing a commun through hole resistor, promoting the manufacturer but also a PCB manufacturer at the same time. 

Richard, any update? Another month has passed and contentless projects, advertising projects, spam projects are still growing. :(

Admins are going through a list we are compiling and taking action on an individual basis. I don't have a date and they won't all be gone overnight.

Thank you for the update Richard. Are you considering to implement measures to prevent posting of those advertising projects/contentless projects in the future (revision of Hackaday terms of use, review of projects before publishing, temporary unpublishing projects with multiple report until admins review, etc.)?

I am unable to upload or edit files, for several days now. Is there a technical issue?

There was an issue (below) that was resolved, are you still having problems editing or uploading to the files section?

Yes, still no uploading or editing files. Started a dummy project and invited you as a contributor, to see if it is just me or not.

Is anybody else having this problem? I guess not everyone, otherwise it would be a major problem. Is it limited to particular browsers, users, or just me?

I sent you a followup reply.

Very upset with the code of conduct and imposition of speech codes on the open source and hacker communities. Something needs to be done about this.

If you can provide a little more context it would be helpful.

I'm having issues uploading images.  I've verified that the images are less than 5mb and are saved as JPG yet whenever I try to upload them to the gallery I get the "Sorry, image size should be less than 5MB and we only accept JPG/PNG/TIF formats." error message!!!

Sorry about that, I will follow up with you soon.

I seem to have problems uploading images.  No images where accepted by the site. I tried Chrome and Edge, but is seems to be broken. Both in the gallery and in the description no images where accepted (Unknown error). Images where smaller than 1K, JPG format and there is enough space left. Any body else have had this problem?

+1 Same here.  POST https://hackaday.io/api/upload/image keeps returning 500.

Should be working now, thanks.

Checking into this now.

It looks like this has been resolved.

I still had it a few times, but most of the time it works allright. So I could finally upload some images.

Hmm, it worked several hours ago (around 2020-03-08 08:00+00:00). But now it seems not. 
https://imgur.com/ouopdTo.png
https://imgur.com/KKB5Qwy.png 

We will continue to monitor this and keep you updated.

Having the same problem, not able to upload a project image or a top banner image

I pressed like on several projects. How do I find the ones I liked? 

It's in your profile. Click on your avatar, then on your profile page click on the Following link under your background photo. That will take you to a list of projects you follow and like. Unfortunately there seems to be no way to know which are followed and which are liked without clicking on the project.

Thank you! This helps a lot. I'll keep pressing both options. 

I'll message you to sort this out.

Disable follow and/or provide redirect for shelved projects.

Recently a project has been getting some followers despite being shelved and its most recent post pointing to the projects successor. Yet the newer project isn't getting those same followers. Disabling follow might be helpful, a notification the project has been shelved with link to newer project if provided would be great.

I too have projects that I've scrapped or shelved and stated so right at the beginning but it still gets follows. Part of the problem is people may have their own reasons to follow. I think some do it to bookmark to read later. An obsolete project could still be useful to learn what didn't work. Though I wonder about those people who follow dozens of projects in a day, where do they find enough hours in the day to read projects?

So I'm against any mandatory action on obsolete projects. If people ignore messages in the description and still want to follow, let them.

Site Issue! I cannot edit the description for a file that I uploaded. I'm getting "

403 Insufficient Privileges

You don't have privileges for this operation"

Please fix this! 

This should be resolved now.

I've mentioned this before, but it would be nice to be able to collapse My Pages as I have written quite a few now, and it takes a lot of scrolling to find the one I want to grab the URL of. A search function over My Pages would also be useful.

+1

It would be really great if browsing the gallery wouldn't affect the browser history, so you don't have to navigate back through all the images you've just watched in order to get back to the project. 

+1

There is a link from the gallery back to the project, but that's still a forward link so you can't go back from the project to unwind how you got there.

I would really appreciate if Hackaday could change to using an unambiguous date format such as ISO 8601 yyyy-mm-dd or by using month names. Your use of mm/dd/yyyy can lead to confusion for those of us who live in countries where dd/mm/yyyy is the official and equally unfortunate date format.  See https://xkcd.com/1179/ Best wishes!

A strange thing is happening with comments posted to profiles. When a project is mentioned with a hash link, it is seen like this, where I have replaced < with LT and > with GT to prevent any interpretation:

Thanks for the like and follow of LTa data-mention-project-id="182965" href="/project/182965"GT#Board clock LT/aGT!

But once posted, it looks like a hash link as it's supposed to in the feed.

Thanks will get this handled

Hello! We're in Ukraine and hackaday.io doesn't open for us at all. It started several days ago and we thought it was an outage at first, but today we checked with proxy and VPN and everything worked. We've checked from different Ukrainian IPs and the result is the same. hackaday.com opens normally, only hackaday.io doesn't. Could you please look into this? Thanks!

I'll check on this and message you.

Your VPN may not have the correct port enabled in which you would need to contact your VPN SP to request an opening.

Looks like routing to here from Ukraine is timing out around https://kiev-b2-link.telia.net/ you may need to continue using VPN for now to bypass where that issue is happening. I'll let you know if anything changes.

Thanks for looking into it, Richard! We'll have to use VPN for now, hope this issue resolves soon. Will be looking forward for any updates if you have them!

Hello!. Just a question. Why my project site viewer count stuck in 230 views?

The project is not showing to the public?.
Here is the project site:
https://hackaday.io/project/183736-3d-metal-printer
Many thanks!

Looks like this updated

Many thanks Richard!

Hi there, I just wanted to write a buildlog and saw, that the window for adding pictures, code, hyperlinks, etc is gone.

Hey Dominik have you checked the page since then if the buttons have returned?

Yes, the buttons are back again.

Today, it seems that the chat is broken and does not load.

Not seeing any chat outages here in logs. If these problems are off and on, it could be temp routing issue to you from one of the cdns. I blame the storms.

Well, it says "connecting" and the circular thing keeps spinning. Tried resetting my connection and using another browser - same result.

Edit: The log-edit function is also down again. These issues seem to be connected

Also wrote an e-mail to projects-contact@hackaday.com about this: My project 183321 got deleted. Was this by accident or can you share further information why? Would be quite nice to get at least a project with same number back, because I printed the link on the PCB. Thanks!

is that the one that was private but showed up in my feed ?

no another one. The one which showed up in your feed is still there

It has been restored.

Thanks! Any easy/simple reason why? just to avoid it in the future

We made some changes to an over active spam filter, it shouldn't be happening going forward.

Feature request. Can we have a project search that's actually USABLE? For example, I *swear* I remember, somewhere in the distant echoes of my half-addled brain, that there was a C64 emulator using the "ESP32 TouchDown" platform as a project on here, but Search can't immediately pull it up... and clicking on tags and keywords somehow WIDENS the field of results instead of NARROWING it.

Amazon's "I'mma just spam random crap at you coz I've no idea what you want, dude" and Walmart's "Just go to the store bro" website searches are better than this!

If I could find that price might actually buy a TouchDown on Tindie... but I can't find Jack Squat. I'm not gonna bug the guy who made it, this isn't his problem. Im sorry, but: this is Hackaday, can't you guys code?!

The numbers next to tags and components display the filtered search results. Can you share a search link that expands rather than narrows the results?

I also don't see a project like that, Google doesn't have one indexed either.

Did you check Hackaday.com ?

I did not check the Blog side, but I'm pretty sure if it wasn't here then my memory just made it up. It does that sometimes... ADD memory suuucks, man.

The search issue seems to have vanished since this morning; when I experienced it, it was on mobile. Maybe it was related to the "create a new project" bug that the others were reporting...? I dunno. I was on the Chrome browser in my Samsung A11, it badly needs updating and I'm lazy lol. Still hasn't updated but bug has vanished on mobile and desktop both.

Not the first time technology has made a liar of me lol.

How come when I edit a project log it loses all the image references and is in a very small, HTML orientated screen. I also cannot access my account settings to check or change my email settings?  What is going on?

Can confirm, editing of old logs is broken.

Ok, thanks for advice, I will hold off for a few days? How will we know it has been fixed?

Looking into this, is it intermittent? If the log does not load correctly (no image refs) hold off, do not save the log.

The problem disapperead now, worked again.

Well, now "Edit files" shows similar symptoms

Too late, I did keep a copy of the text though. I will redo the 4 images when it is working. However all highlights, links etc are lost too.