Friday, June 22

Ahh! 1.5 hours left to post!!!

Well, I said I'm gonna post everyday, so I am. And I'm not going to use that post-ahead feature for at least 2 weeks.

Its 10:30, so I better write.

I was just reading someones blog where they're criticizing a forum I go to thats in an odd spot. Basically, their "product" has died, but there are some people still coming in, I'd say 20 a day. These people are wanting to use a similar product, and trying to take over the site.

Its quite annoying, personally. Since its high up in Google, theres tons of spam. This means that moderation is a hot-button issue. The product is also mostly child-oriented, causing 1/2 the site to be immature, and needing more moderation to keep it safe for young'ins. Theres also very few people fit for the moderator job.

I think its going to collapse. I really do. Its bloated out too much feature-wise, and it was hand-coded, so I feel bad.

Most vet's are only around for friends, which would make it easy to just switch to a standard site. I'm trying to help by moving people along to my site, but its really slow.

They're a sinking ship. They should stop.

Thursday, June 21

Spam Perverntion on Forums

Most forums have problems with spammers. I assume once bbCommunity starts rolling, it will have its fair share. However, I wanted to share thoughts on how to stop spammers. These aren't proven, but they would have stopped 90% of spam I've seen.

1. Captchas : These are those annoying little things where you have to type in the random letters on the disco background. Although these will stop bots, they will annoy your users like crazy. To prevent it, I'd do it one every 5 posts for new users, once every 10 posts for older users, and always for a new thread. If you do, use www.reCaptcha.net , you type in 2 words that were scanned in and could not be read by the computer. 1 of them has a known answer from previous checks. As people use this, they help digitize books.


2. Flood Control. I hate this entirely, but it works. If your site is bad enough to need it, please, for the love of freedom, ONLY LIMIT THREADS! If you limit posts per hour, I will hunt you down.

3. Better Filter: Try removing spaces and such before filtering. You'll probably have to program something, but it will get a lot of the "da mn"'s on your forum.

Personally, I'm going to let people swear on my site, but only use words on a "list". Each person sets a "vulgarity level" to filter out which words they don't want to see.

I'm back!

Okay, sorry for leaving you guys for over a month, but I'm back! I should continue to post semi-daily from now on, considering I'm out of school and I have nothing better to do :P