Hi. Can we do something about all the spam?

[Harry Meatmotor]

Puhleeze?

It’s been at least 3 months now of this crap.

And i’m too lazy to search for another thread where this was already discussed.

K’thnxbye!

[Drewdane]

Don’t worry, Freezing Saddles ends in a couple of months.

[Erin Potter]

This is a content repost from the other threads about SPAM, which I would like to, but have been infected with a laze…

We’re in the process of moving to a system where newly registered users will not be able to post without their content being reviewed by a moderator within one business day. This would stop current users like yourselves from seeing SPAM, and would hopefully only be a minor inconvenience to brand new users.

Thanks for being part of the forum, and making all the awesome conversations about biking happen. Keep doing your thing, and know we’re working on it.

[Jenkinms]

@Erin Potter 172434 wrote:

This is a content repost from the other threads about SPAM, which I would like to, but have been infected with a laze…

We’re in the process of moving to a system where newly registered users will not be able to post without their content being reviewed by a moderator within one business day. This would stop current users like yourselves from seeing SPAM, and would hopefully only be a minor inconvenience to brand new users.

Thanks for being part of the forum, and making all the awesome conversations about biking happen. Keep doing your thing, and know we’re working on it.

Is it possible to enable Captcha or reCaptcha on user registration? It’s not foolproof, but its low effort on users and enough to keep lots of script kiddies from spamming us.

[cvcalhoun]

@Jenkinms 172459 wrote:

Is it possible to enable Captcha or reCaptcha on user registration? It’s not foolproof, but its low effort on users and enough to keep lots of script kiddies from spamming us.

Captcha can be implemented. So can honeypots. And Akismet. And questions that require specific types of responses (e.g., an e-mail question that is marked “URL” in the code, but won’t submit unless the response is in the form of an e-mail, not a URL). And https. But all of these require time and effort on the part of the administrators, who are volunteers, so it may take some time.

[Jenkinms]

It’s totally understandable that it would take time for the mods to implement a new feature. Captcha’s a suggestion, not a criticism. I figured if it was a setting in the forum’s admin panel (which it looks like it should be, unless my googling was out of date), it’d be lower effort for them than reviewing every post made by a new user.

[n18]

@Erin Potter 172434 wrote:

This is a content repost from the other threads about SPAM, which I would like to, but have been infected with a laze…

We’re in the process of moving to a system where newly registered users will not be able to post without their content being reviewed by a moderator within one business day. This would stop current users like yourselves from seeing SPAM, and would hopefully only be a minor inconvenience to brand new users.

Thanks for being part of the forum, and making all the awesome conversations about biking happen. Keep doing your thing, and know we’re working on it.

+1 for Captcha or other automated measures. One business day could be 3 days during the holidays, and I think most of us suggest this forum to others on weekends.

[cvcalhoun]

@Jenkinms 172487 wrote:

It’s totally understandable that it would take time for the mods to implement a new feature. Captcha’s a suggestion, not a criticism. I figured if it was a setting in the forum’s admin panel (which it looks like it should be, unless my googling was out of date), it’d be lower effort for them than reviewing every post made by a new user.

I think one issue is that the forum currently uses an old version of the software, meaning it would have to be updated before some of these features could be added.

[Jenkinms]

@cvcalhoun 172524 wrote:

I think one issue is that the forum currently uses an old version of the software, meaning it would have to be updated before some of these features could be added.

Ahh, that does complicate things. I suppose I don’t even want to ask how many versions back we are?

Sent from my SM-G950U using Tapatalk

[peterw_diy]

@Jenkinms 172531 wrote:

Ahh, that does complicate things. I suppose I don’t even want to ask how many versions back we are?

Last time I tried to figure this out, it looked like BikeArlington was using a hosted vbulletin service from what looked to me like a second rate provider (this was after Apple had announced that upcoming iPhone OS versions would not allow apps to connect to Web Services except over https yet BA’s vendor did not offer https service even as an added cost option [which is all the more shameful since SNI, CloudFlare, and Let’s Encrypt have essentially dropped the price of https to zero]).

[peterw_diy]

@Erin Potter 172434 wrote:

We’re in the process of moving to a system where newly registered users will not be able to post without their content being reviewed by a moderator within one business day. This would stop current users like yourselves from seeing SPAM

I’m a little apprehensive about the “one business day” part. IMO every new post from an untrusted user should remain stuck in purgatory until you pass judgement. Don’t make it easy to spam on long weekends, snow days, etc. The signal to noise ratio is becoming unbearably low here, and I no longer recommend this forum to new riders because of that.

Thanks.

[hozn]

@peterw_diy 172556 wrote:

Last time I tried to figure this out, it looked like BikeArlington was using a hosted vbulletin service from what looked to me like a second rate provider (this was after Apple had announced that upcoming iPhone OS versions would not allow apps to connect to Web Services except over https yet BA’s vendor did not offer https service even as an added cost option [which is all the more shameful since SNI, CloudFlare, and Let’s Encrypt have essentially dropped the price of https to zero]).

I wonder if it would be worth switching to something like premium hosted proboards (https://www.proboards.com/premium-forum-features). Maybe to do it ad-free, etc. would be a little more costly than this current server. But this sw is truly terrible.

I still want to try Discourse https://www.discourse.org/. Once FS-related development is over, I should be able to find time to put something up for evaluation.

[mstone]

@hozn 172566 wrote:

I wonder if it would be worth switching to something like premium hosted proboards (https://www.proboards.com/premium-forum-features). Maybe to do it ad-free, etc. would be a little more costly than this current server. But this sw is truly terrible.

I still want to try Discourse https://www.discourse.org/. Once FS-related development is over, I should be able to find time to put something up for evaluation.

the trouble is that switching to anything else means losing all the history, all the links, etc., which are a valuable resource in themselves

[hozn]

@mstone 172685 wrote:

the trouble is that switching to anything else means losing all the history, all the links, etc., which are a valuable resource in themselves

Yeah. There may be some migration potential with Discourse, given that it is open-source, but probably not with proboards.

[n18]

Without further ado:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_Internet_forum_software

[Author]

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