Forum upgrade

[liquibyte]

Looks like you got it before I could reply to the email.  Oddly enough, I was going to suggest a database purge,  not dropping those particular tables.  I imagine they're large though.  I'm glad you got it sorted out.

 

[mixos1]

Yep, upgrade went ok.

Do you like the new forum? Would you think it will be more usable?

Mike

 

[liquibyte]

It's definitely more configurable from my understanding.  All of my experience in forum software comes from phpBB, myBB and a little Vanilla (I contributed a little to the blog world at the b2 split).  It's all PHP so from my perspective it should be easy enough to configure to do what you want.

The forums I visit that use version 2 vs. 1 don't seem to have as much of a spam problem, although that could be the aggressive moderation efforts rather than the software used.  I think that's the one thing that has kept participation down here.  I would have still come here either way because I like the project I did, although I, and I'm sure others, think it should be updated on the front page.

Do you plan on installing any themes?  I like a dark theme and have been using stylish to darken things up because of that.  I did look at a few and had planned on updating the css for what I use based on this one.

 

[mixos1]

Right now we have around 1-2 spam posts per 10 minutes. What do you propose to fight them?

I plan to use the default theme because i like it. Now i have to customize it a bit.

 

[liquibyte]

I'd say lock new registrations down for now and then do a bit of research on what spam measures have worked for other SMF forums.  There's a wik at simplemachines.  I was reading it the other day but you never got back to me on what you had installed so I couldn't test at the time.  I can still do the testing but my site gets zero traffic except for me because there's nothing there for the spambots to detect as a way in.  I'd say you have the perfect situation to do a cleanup here.  First thing I'd do is lock new registrations and then delete all users with 0 and 1 posts.  It's kind of harsh for those that are legitimate but that will make the user base easier to search through and identify spam accounts (mass mail to those users explaining?).  It's labor intensive but once you have the bots taken care of, the human spammers can be dealt with in a quick manner because you won't have to weed through so much cruft.  One thing I would do is to activate mod verification (does SMF have this and is it configurable for moderators?).  You'll have to get a few more active mods in this case.  I noticed that some of the mods you have here haven't visited in some time.

wise old man		March 23, 2008
Gazza			June 23, 2008
Ante			December 21, 2008
gogo2520		October 02, 2010
prateeksikka		April 23, 2012
hotwaterwizard		August 25, 2012
Herman the German	August 27, 2012
Dazza			October 01, 2012

These users are spammers:  wrpriijx1, wisdom619, Edmundzyk, albert665, RMTbnsDub.  This one is especially obvious: $random[a..z]jasonqyr.

I think the biggest issue you have is registration spam, I'd address that first.

I didn't mean to change the default theme, just add something dark as a user choice for us insomniacs.

 

[liquibyte]

I've set up a test forum and have installed the mod we talked about and I've updated my profile to have links for the bots to follow to try and drive traffic that way.  Email registration verification was also set up and I left captcha at medium (the default) for now.  I also copied your keywords and boards with descriptions to see if I can index alongside you on the search engines.  We'll see how it goes over time I suppose.

 

[liquibyte]

I think you need to set reserved names.  Members>registration>set reserved names un-check match case and put mixos in there.

Latest Member: mixosp

Edit:  with this version (don't know if it was in 1.1.19) you can do fine grained user permissions.

Admin > Members > Permissions > Settings
  Enable the option to deny permissions
  HelpEnable permissions for post count based groups

This opens up a more proactive way to keep out the undesirables as you can set someone under a certain post count to be approved with their posts.  Set this up for 5 post or so and the bots go away immediately.

 

[liquibyte]

Looks like the upgrade and a few of the things you've done have cut the spam to a very good minimum, congrats.  Since I probably don't need to test anymore, I'm installing myBB to mess around with it.  I've got a theme in development that will allow the user to set a cookie for various element colors of their choosing.  I've also been looking at the jqueryui theme builder code and may be able to adapt that into a theme as well.  I'd like to make that one cross forum compatible so no more installing themes, let the user theme the site.