Well I figure as the forum ages, the number of significant messages goes up. Please, though, try to keep it somewhat clean of the unnecessary stuff. The size doesn't concern me, the forum is about 150MB right now, but the problem there is the larger it is, the more memory it consumes on the base computer to run it. So far this hasn't been problematic but there's a chance the gallery, since it's also a database, might add enough strain that I might have to prune the forum down a bit. I'd prefer not to since I want to keep all our old posts, but if that's what it comes to, that's what it comes to.

I'm hoping the upgrade's boost to the memory allowance should make this problem all in my head, though.

Yes guys, I know about the god damn stupid spambots lately. All I can do about it aside from delete them as they come is upgrade the forum software, which will be a huge undertaking I can't promise I'll have time for until I'm back in the states. In the meantime I'm keeping track of how often this happens and seeing if I can stop it any other way.

I've dealt with spambots a lot on a previous forum, and it's not the name that attracts them... I'm fairly certain it's the fact it's the easiest to get to. It's the first topic in the forum and thus they spam it, because anything else takes more effort.

I'm looking around and it would seem the big question is whether the spam is coming from an automated program or from a very poor person someone doing this randomly to as many sites as they can for a penny a hit. Upgrading the forum software and adding a few mods to the registration process will help if it's an automated program, but if it's real live people, the problem can't be stopped at registration.

I'm going to see if I can't upgrade the forum in the next day or two--frankly this is a problem since being up in Canada means I'm not on my own computer. Think of it like trying to drive someone else's car or cook in someone else's kitchen, but on a larger scale. I will also, if that goes relatively well, add a basic captcha. It's not perfect but it should help a little bit.

After that we'll give things a few days for me to work out kinks in the upgrading and determine if I've improved matters at all, and if I haven't, there's a punBB extention that sets up Akismet for the forum. I'm very hesitant to do this though because the mod has a reputation for not working and also for eating up legit posts.

The shitty fact of the matter is that it's entirely possible nothing I do to the software will fix the problem without a major cost to the actual users, so it may just become a situation where the mods have to stay on top of it. I feel like shit about this, because this is supposed to be our happy awesome safe zone of the internats and here you guys have to deal with this shit.

Well it sucks.

New strategy: Just ignore them, we'll delete them as we see them. They only post new threads, so they're easy to spot for us mods anyway. If they show up in the threads it's time to report.

I may have to see if there's a mod for admin authorization of new accounts. I reallllly don't like that since it means people that want to post immediately can't, but if that way any new registration has to be cleared by one of the mods, which will turn off a lot of the lazier ones and subject them to our assessment of whether SEXFRUCIALISLOLZ is actually a real SKU fan/potential member.

The usernames are pretty obvious most of the time, and it just adds a pain in the ass step that would deter a lot of spammers.

As for captcha, I would love to make it a trivia kind of thing, but it does frankly require I find a mod that at least partly works the same way. My coding skills are not good enough for me to pull something like that out my backside, and I just poked around for mods like that and found none for PunBB. The tradeoff with using PunBB is while it's far more secure that PhpBB, it's also got fewer mods to try out. (Believe me, we'd be getting a lot more of this crap with PhpBB.)

Hmm. On thought, depending on how the Captcha program is built I might be able to mod it so that it will work as a question and answer thing. If I find one that's simplistic enough to have x image of words agree with y answer, I can just edit the pictures to ask a basic question with a different answer as correct input.

Unfortunately a clever feat of coding will take some time for me, so please be patient while I try to figure out this crap. I'll be back in the US soon enough, where it's easier for me to work, if harder given the schedule I'm about to have. That's no great thing for me, since the subject fairly easily brings me to tears, but I guess it'll be good for this particular situation.

I don't know if this is really a glitch, but was it intentional to have our profile information displayed with each post?

Also, all the the BBCoding, url, img, and smileys have disappeared. I'm making the assumption that this one was not intentional.

Neither of those were deliberate, and they're both fixed. I left the forum online instead of putting it in maintenance mode, so there was no downtime but a couple extra bugs of that sort.

Aside from upgrading the actual forum, I've added two things to the registration in the hopes that it'll slow down spam a bit. For the automated spam, I added a basic CAPTCHA, the least complicated I could find, since it'll be easier to remove if it doesn't work. (In which case I'll attempt to put in a more complex one.) For the manual entry spam, I edited the rules so that you have to click the right character name to agree to them. A computer would get around this very easily, since the forms are all cancels and an agree, but hopefully it'll at least bog down the human spammers. I also added a registration hash mod that makes the registration page a unique URL for every visit, meaning a bot can't just go to the obvious URL and get to the registration page, you have to click it through the website. I've done what I can for now, and we'll see how this goes and work from there.

Unfortunately I can't seem to find a mod to force new users to be authorized by admins, but I haven't played all possible cards as far as registration tricks yet. There's Project Honey Pot (kinda like Akismet but only applies to registration by running people through a list of known spammers first), and I did find a mod that you can program to ask specific questions of the user. It's built to ask math problems but you can make it ask just about anything, the more unusual the answer, the better. I will implement these one at a time if they appear necessary, probably by adding the question one and removing the rules trick. All this stuff makes registering fairly complicated as compared to some places, but frankly if someone's so uninterested that they won't answer a simple question and type out what's in a box, then well...too bad.

Oh and I kinda like Gender Disco!

It's a joke.  After she changed General Discussion to Gender Disco, Gio became intoxicated with power and has been playing with the forum titles. 

I'm compulsive, I feel like I spent all day doing nothing because there are no obvious changes to the actual interface of the forum, so to soothe myself I'm dicking with the forum titles.

As for being intoxicated with power, a couple days ago I mentioned to Yasha how amusing it was that the most powerful and best known presence in SKU fandom (I don't think I'd be exaggerating at this point to claim such) belongs to an Akio fan, rather than an Utena one, and that the second in command on that website is a Touga fan. Cute, when you think about it...a lot of power in the community belongs to someone who watched SKU and didn't learn a damn thing.

Oh btw, the traffic to the actual site has gone up about 30-40% since May. I suspect it was the gallery, but I must now take advantage of the extra attention to update.

That's one of the many minor changes I made to the code way in the beginning. Fixed!

Yeah, I've noticed the "General Dissection"... awesome.

Er... there are no new PMs in my mail and it constantly has the "TEH NEW PMS HERE" thing....

Is it just me, or did "show all unread topics" and "mark all topics as read" used to show up more in more places than just the index? If it didn't, it'd be cool if it did. I can't be expected to click twice in order to find new topics and the like.