FAQ

Like a lot of other sites, we have experienced battles against spam. Sometimes it would seem we were ahead of the game, and other times we were painfully behind.

Today, we have implemented several features to help protect our members - and our site - from spam. First, we have joined Stop Forum Spam. This service helps to keep known spammers from even registering an account with us by checking email addresses, usernames, and IP addresses against their database. If they are found, they are reported and blocked.

Additionally, we have joined Mollom to help moderate content. Mollom works by checking content for typical spamming behaviors (such as an excessive amount of links) as well as the history behind the user posting the content (ie., long-term members with no history of spam). If Mollom believes that the content is spam, it will block that content from being saved to our system. If it's unsure, it may generate a captcha. Please be patient as we are still "training" Mollom to work with our members. If you suddenly see that you have to answer a captcha setting, please don't be alarmed - it's part of a method of getting Mollom to know who you are to us.

Of course, there is only one, truly effective way to obtain 100% protection against spam on any web site - and that's to not have a web site in the first place. Clearly this is not an option. Spam may still sneak up and try to smack us. Should you come across spam in this way, we ask that you report it to us right away so that we can take care of it.

The short answer to this question is "No".

While we understand that most of the time when someone writes an article and posts it to multiple sites, they are really just trying to expose their writing to as many people as possible, the truth is that by doing this you are hurting yourself and the sites that contain your article. Search engines that find the exact same content on more than one site have begun penalizing those sites for flooding content. If a search engine blacklists your article, you actually lose readers and both sites lose traffic. Additionally, there are several sites that do not allow you to repost articles anywhere else (usually for this reason).

If you have already written and posted an article on another site and you would like to bring attention to it from your readers here at Progressive U, there are two options that you can do:

1. Write a new article here on Progressive U in which you can quote or even link to the old article. Do not quote more than one or two paragraphs and the rest of your article must still total at least 200 words.
2. Decide which site you would like to see the article on - depending on your criteria you may decide to move the article over to Progressive U or that it would be better to leave it where it is at. If you decide to move the article to Progressive U, first remove it from the other site, then repost it on Progressive U a couple of days later. You can make note - if you choose - to explain that the blog entry is a repost.

First, create an account and log in.

Then, in the right sidebar, under 'Navigation', there's a link for 'add content'. Click on this link, then click 'blog entry'.

Every blog entry must have a title, at least one progressive value, and at least one tag associated with it. Tags are general categories used to describe the content of the blog, such as 'politics', 'medicine', etc.

Also, each blog must have at least 200 words. If you cannot write 200 words about a subject, try broadening the subject. Generalize it. Try looking up more information about the topic, etc.

Note that the bulk of your blog should not be quotes from a source. The bulk of your blog should be your own words and interpretation of whatever source you use.

If your password isn't working, it may not be your fault. While we were able to keep the user account, there are some that the passwords had to be re-encrypted; because of this, your password may not be working. You can click on the "Reset Password" link to have a new password sent out to you.

If this does not work, please use this form to contact our technical team and we will reset your password for you. We urge you to first try the automatic help by clicking on the retrieve password link, since using the form will require waiting for a human to be able to go in and reset your password.

If you've been a regular, active member of Progressive U at any point in the 6 six years, then you likely would have had a lot of material posted to this site. When tragedy struck our old database, we tried very hard to keep hold of all those blog entries because we valued them as much as you do. Unfortunately, our trying to hold on to them seriously impaired our ability to come back online.

So, we are very sad to say that those old blog entries are gone - we simply had to bite the bullet and get the site back up and running. If you had any of your old blog entries saved or backed up, we invite you to re-post them as new blog entries.

One tactic to try to recover some of your old blogs, should you not have them backed up, is to search for your username and progressiveu.org through google. Every so often, an old blog will still be available through the google cache. To access it, find a synopsis that sounds like a blog you wrote, and instead of clicking the link itself (which will be dead now), click the link under it that says 'Cache'. It will bring you to a plain text version of your blog. Best of luck!