To each and every Asustor employee on this forum.

[Kapitein Haak]

To whom who may put this to good use:

About a year or two ago, I bought my Asustor NAS. The company was looking very promising and working hard on improving the functionality. The last few months however it seems to be going down the drain. As much as I hate to say this, but I won't be on the forums for the upcoming time. The amount of spam and other nonsense that gets posted on these forums is much more than the number of legit posts. Besides, the posts which actually matter aren't being picked up by the Asustor employees.

Kill the forum
I have been assured by an Asustor employee that the forum administrator would actually watch this forum for spam. Apparantly this is failing (badly). Mark the forum read-only, fire the forum administrator, copy the data and start a new forum. This is not what you want your potential buyers to see when they are investigating your product.

Setup a beta program
After the ADM 2.3 disaster and the more recent 2.5.2 problems, start a beta program. Or at least launch the new firmware on just a single model and expand from there. You could even give beta tester a higher priority with the support engineers to get more volunteers for a beta program. Oh, and do recheck the testing program for new firmware. It does need a bit of improvement.

Read the forum
Instead of creating a AICAST app which probably only a few will use, please expand and improve the core functionality. There are lot's of feature request which could (should?) be implemented before committing resource on nice to have stuff. Now the useful features like Photo Gallery, File Explorer and Looks Good are lacking.... Get someone on the forum and READ them.

Hoping things will improve and Asustor will find the way back up towards Synology and not down to below Thecus....
Going to enjoy real life, with less porn and advertisement IRL on a commercial TV channel then on the forums.

Best regards,
Kapitein Haak

[dhstsw]

Hope you get a positive answer on your post.
That would be interesting seeing the nearly complete lack of interest Asustor showed to the forum so far (not to talk about other matters).

Good luck.

[MikeG.6.5]

Kapitein Haak,

You'll be missed man. You were one of the voices of reason here on the forums. Had I known how close you were to stopping your involvement I wouldn't have asked you to cover my pet app's forums if I were gone.

I couldn't agree more with anything you said, except with regards to the apps Asustor needs to work on. There are third party apps out there that can do anything the home grown apps are capable of doing, and do the job many time better than Asustor could ever hope to get with their own apps. Those third party apps have developers dedicated to just those apps and they do them very well. Asustor just needs to do some tweaking of the apps in a few cases to have a major winner on their hands.

But instead, we see more apps like AiCast, and up da-tes to other half implemented and poorly thought out applications like AiVideo. Where is the up da-te to HTML5 for the ADM interface? Why did we get another mobile app few if any will actually use? If HTML5 were implemented in the ADM most of those mobile apps would be redundant! We wouldn't need a single one of them if HTML5 and PushBullet or other push notification suites were available.

Truthfully, the only reason I have AiMaster on any of my mobile devices is because Asustor hasn't provided a way to use PushBullet for log notifications. I use PushBullet for notifications for 90% of the apps running on my NAS now. I just need to get it for log files and I'm good to go!

I honestly don't expect you to get an official response, KH....

And I think that the usefulness of the forums is fast approaching a null point. With the number of official advertising and news grabbers posting now, the really useful information is dropping off, which is almost as bad as the porn spam we have had lately. I don't want a copy of the facebook announcements posted every time an app gets updated. I want real world results, and real information on how to maximize my use of the NASes I have. I don't want to be referred to the Asustor store every time I ask a hardware question. Or have the question thrown back at me as to why I want to do something. Or be advised to upgrade as the device is EOL....

In any case.... Asustor is losing control of these forums and you are right... It's the employee's fault for not being more active on the forums. The employee in charge of the forums should be fired, or demoted and someone take charge and fix this. Update the forums to require 20+ posts for links. Require moderator approval for any posts from new accounts. Ban accounts and IP's from users that spam, regardless of the type of spam. (And yes, that means posting the same thing in 20 or more sub forums to get your counts up!) Put in captcha (sp) to verify the posts are coming from a real person and not an automated bot. None of these things are hard to do. Hell, I was doing this back in the 90's with the BB software I ran back then.... If the software Asustor is running this forum on can't support it, then it's time for new software. (And seriously??? The word UP DA TES is censored???)

We might not always agree on things, KH... But at least you have your head (and heart) in the right place. Peace, Out Man!

[Shawn.S@AST]

Hi Kaptein,

Sorry to let you down and thanks for your kind contribution to the community!!!

For the spam or porn posting, we have continuously banned them and even set key words to filter them out. Recently we also modified the registration method to avoid the robotic registration. If the situation can not be improved, we are considering a few postings first before user can post link or photos as suggested by MikeG.6.5

Previously we do have the beta program for the major upgrade such as from 2.2 to 2.3 or 2.3 to 2.4. However, for minor upgrade, we do not do the beta testing. With the 2.5.2 incident this time, the surveillance center over logging did get away from our internal testing with its probabilistic happening. We have already found cure for it and will release it asap. So if necessary, we will put beta for this new version also. For the current users suffering from it, our engineers are assisting in clearing the jammed log and the data will be intact. We will also release the step by step instructions if user want to clear the logs in volume 0 by themselves in different thread. (http://forum.asustor.com/viewtopic.php? ... ast#p21787)

And we will for sure more actively participate in forum discussion!

For Photo Gallery with folder structure, it does got delayed quite some time with more fine-tuning and performance issue. We have already got the beta version which looks great and we hope to release it as early as we can.

For File Explorer with Java not supported in Chrome and LooksGood with Chrome not supporting NPAPI so VLC can not be used, we are aware of these requests. But because of the engineer resources got occupied with the previous requested features (as you know, there are many features requests and we will have to put them in queue to develop), we may review the priorities and make some adjustments.

Thanks once again for your kind contribution and also to all friends in the community.

[Shawn.S@AST]

Hi MikeG6.5,

We have almost finished the PushBullet and will release it soon!

[dhstsw]

For the spam or porn posting, we have continuously banned them and even set key words to filter them out. Recently we also modified the registration method to avoid the robotic registration. If the situation can not be improved, we are considering a few postings first before user can post link or photos as suggested by MikeG.6.5

In fact, here another storm of spam.

Good work.

[MikeG.6.5]

Yeah, I saw that... It's almost not worth logging in to help people on the forums anymore..

Asustor has lost so much credibility lately, with the failed upgrade in the ADM to the porn and spam posts by bots, it's becoming worthless even trying to help....

[aj2]

Sorry to see you go.
I understand your frustration regarding the spam. These days it is hard to protect yourself against the forum bots like Xrumer, GSA SER, Ultimate Demon and Senuke. Yes I know the tools, these are just a few.. Go on YouTube and watch yourself, they are very powerful.
Asustor use PHP Bulletin Board for their forum and this open source script is well supported by the tools I listed above.
In the past I had some travel forums about Greece, Aruba and Hawaii and closed these forums for posting. Not because of all the spam, but the maintenance was not worth activity. Now everyone is on Facebook and twitter so basically Facebook killed my forum. The bigger Facebook gets, the less active users I had. I also had to deal with forum spam but my moderators were very active and they were able to keep everything clean. The moderators I had were the most active users. If someone was active and reliable this user could become moderator.
If you want an active forum without lots of spam, you need to code a script by yourself. If you are the only one using this script, it is not worth for the spammer to invest time creating a template for their spam bot for just your forum.
Also, akismet.com and stopforumspam.com are prevention tools and will keep your forum clean.

Since spammers use the forum just for ranking their own website / product, place a noindex tag on the page (thread) and a nofollow tag on the url's in the posts. This is just another prevention method against the spammer.

I would like to see a private forum, and a decent FAQ to the outside. So if a problem is solved, make it sure question and solution is published to the outside. I think its very irritating reading the entire thread to find a solution. In this forum it is not that big of a deal but when there are 1500 replies in a thread……

I hope Kapitein Haak will visiting the forum once in a while and share his knowledge.

Take care.

[Shawn.S@AST]

Hi aj2,

Thanks so much for the precious experience sharing!!! We are studying akismet.com and stopforumspam.com now and we have also devised the new registration method to see if it will work.

[aj2]

Creating a bulletproof system against spammers, automatic bots, forum posting services and so on is not possible. Making it difficult for them is possible.
Maybe its possible to add an captcha when creating a thread and randomly at a reply. For the spammer, A captcha service like Death By Captcha or Decaptcher costs $$.
This will make the forum less interesting for the spammer.

Anyway, lots of possibilities to protect against spammers.

Cheers.