This forum system just gets worse and worse

Like all things, change takes time to get used to.

The quoting and editing functions really aren't too bad. My biggest gripe would be the fact when you link something, you can't tell it's linked in your reply until you save.

Not only does it lose posts on editing, saying that it's being referred to mods but then disappearing into a black hole,

This happens sometimes when the edits make the post look like an edit was made for spam purposes, sometimes they'll make a post then edit it to add a link which could flag the spam filter to get involved. The post itself just goes into a moderation limbo until one of our moderators has a chance to look over it, and flag it as acceptable or otherwise. On that note, I found one of your posts in the filter earlier today and cleared it.

Not only does it lose posts on editing, saying that it's being referred to mods but then disappearing into a black hole,This happens sometimes when the edits make the post look like an edit was made for spam purposes, sometimes they'll make a post then edit it to add a link which could flag the spam filter to get involved. The post itself just goes into a moderation limbo until one of our moderators has a chance to look over it, and flag it as acceptable or otherwise. On that note, I found one of your posts in the filter earlier today and cleared it.

Yes, I saw that this one had reappeared, unlike others that have gone awol... Considering the edit was one word, seems odd to flag it...

I don't know the full logic behind how they check edits, but I believe it's the entire content of the post that gets checked, and not in reference to the original posted version. I'll check out the other ones, see if I can find them.

It is not a bad plan to do a copy all right before you hit the post button. Much less stress while waiting for the post to appear if you know you can paste and try again rather than re-typing. A quick ^A ^C and you have it, or a couple mouse clicks if you prefer.

It is not a bad plan to do a copy all right before you hit the post button. Much less stress while waiting for the post to appear if you know you can paste and try again rather than re-typing. A quick ^A ^C and you have it, or a couple mouse clicks if you prefer.
I've lost an embarrassing amount of posts to a refresh...

Much of this moderation nuisance can be avoided by smarter automation, that is probably outside InSided capability.

As a past commercial forum admin I can tell you the best thing that works to reduce forum spam, fast manual intervention based on user reports. Nothing deters a spammer like having his spew come down in a few minutes. We didn't manage to get 24x7 coverage but were pretty close to 20x6.5 by spreading admins across US time zones. Second was reviewing new user's posts and profiles from the admin panels, ate a lot of time but without it the forum was 25% spam.

Automated blocking them is a trade-off between stopping them and messing up legitimate users, smarter tools do help, blocklists based on originating countries helped us a lot (might not be so good for Sonos) as well as checking the links against blocklists based on spam-hosting issues.

Every option we tried like X posts before links could be posted or DMs sent just resulted in a spew of posts to hit the limit. Limiting on membership time helped initially but spammers learned to post an innocent post and come back in 48 hours in a matter of days.

Very few of the spams actually seemed to be directed to our user population, most looked to be trying to leach off our site reputation and boost the spam site in search rankings. When I retired from that job they were looking at converting new members links to plain text and removing the http:// so search engines wouldn't weight them in their rankings, not sure where that went.

It is not a bad plan to do a copy all right before you hit the post button. Much less stress while waiting for the post to appear if you know you can paste and try again rather than re-typing. A quick ^A ^C and you have it, or a couple mouse clicks if you prefer.
I thought that I had, to be honest...

My last three posts have gone into the moderation black hole, I have been targeted for perfectly proper responses, and it is very irritating.
I shall now stay away from posting for a couple of weeks to see if this changes after that gap.
Let's see how this post fares...

My last three posts have gone into the moderation black hole, I have been targeted for perfectly proper responses, and it is very irritating.
I shall now stay away from posting for a couple of weeks to see if this changes after that gap.
Let's see how this post fares.