@sdetweil said in help on new spam control idea:

why whack the good new users?

Well, I was thinking that

I don’t find it horribly annoying especially if it’s the kind that just makes you pick the object from a grid of photos. It doesn’t take too long and it does keep the spam bots from posting. I don’t particularly like it… but I don’t find it horrible either – especially if it stops happening after I’m a member in good standing. You could base it on reputation points. After reputation is gained… then no more reCaptcha. Or if we don’t have the issue with bots… then forget I mentioned it.

What about reCaptcha required to submit a post for new users for the first x number of posts?

@kayakbabe It think posts that have certain spammy words or phrases could be added to moderation too like

now hiring
buy now
be your own boss
additional income
limited time
earn money
get rich
I enjoyed your post
You write very well
I offer you
I was reading this article and find it very informative

There are obvious ones that recur here but I can’t think of them right now.

Also how about no including links for new users until they make x number of allowed posts. I run some sites and we get visited by human spammers who will make two or three comments to try to get the posts with links to show. Usually it’s garbage, ipso lorem, or something that just doesn’t make sense. So I just moderate all posts that include links from users with less than 10 number of good posts. Or, I can go ahead a mark a user as moderation exempt if I determine them to be legit.

how about allow nodejs.org and www.npmjs.com too.

@hesspoint You can shut down the operating system BUT you can’t completely shutdown the power to it. The only way to actually have the pi completely off is to unplug it. By running a shutdown command the led on the pi will still be drawing power and showing you it “isn’t running”.

If you just want to shutdown the operating system/mirror etc and don’t care that the pi still has power… Then, you can do it via the operating system. There is a thing called a cron job which you setup on the crontab. You can set it to run every night at the same time.

Here is a link on the raspberry pi forum about retropi (a different project) that will tell you how setup your cron .
https://www.raspberrypi-spy.co.uk/2018/03/raspberry-pi-retropie-shutdown-button/

There are some MagicMirror modules that might help you do the same thing via a web url that points to the pi at your house. You would need a fixed ip address at your house, setup your router to allow the outside world to talk directly to your pi, and setup the module too. I haven’t used one of them.

I think there is an Internet of Things IOT module that could probably work via IFTTT too.

@plainbroke did you look at your pm2 logs? Sam really helped me by explaining where to look. I’ll bet it’s a module.

@sdetweil If I didn’t need a breadboard for testing the button circuits I’m adding, it could be done the way you say. I’m not working on the appearance of my mirror, If I were then I’d do as you suggest. I’m working on adding hardware buttons and a new module to make them function the way I want.

I find it easier to just remove the pi, take it to my desktop where I have a very wide monitor. And where I can play with wiring, breadboard, resisitors, buttons etc. I added the following to my config

electronOptions: {
		fullscreen: false,
		width: 950,
		height: 950
	},

so I can have mm running on one quarter of my screen, I have plenty of room for geany on the other and a terminal window, etc. then can just f5 or ctrl+r when I want to test.

@plainbroke ctrl+m does not stop MagicMirror. It minimizes it so it isn’t showing full screen.

m = minimize

@plainbroke
I use Ctrl+m too so I can minimize the electron browser in order to get to terminal and restart mm.

Are you using pm2? If so, use this command in the terminal to see how many actual instances of MagicMirror are running.

pm2 ls

NOTE: You could see more things in the taskmanager in certain situations where another processing thread is required. That doesn’t mean that Electron or MagicMirror has extra “copies” running on your machine. (My machine always shows at least 8 electron threads running, but I only have one MagicMirror instance running. The more modules have in my mirror, the more electron threads show in taskmanager).

Using pm2 ls, if you see more than one instance you can kill the extras by using the id number of the extra instances. Also, if you see more than one instance, you may just need to redo the pm2 setup.

If F5 or Ctrl+r don’t work (sometimes they don’t seem to fully restart mm if I’ve added a node package to a module I’m working on) then I use the following command from the terminal.

pm2 restart mm

to fully reinitialize and restart mm if I need to in when I’m developing/editing a module.

@kayakbabe DRAT! I just crushed my microSD with my wheelchair. It is definitely time for bed.