Updates to Forum

Greetings everyone!

It's been a long time since I've posted on here. I had been travelling in Scandinavia and Eastern Europe for over 2 months.

There is only one change to the forum that I have to mention, it's a new way of keeping those pesky spammers out from our Blog area. Those of you who frequent the Blogs will have noticed that there's a whole pile of spam that gets spewed in there.

Thanks to the watchful eyes of rick_janson, and our moderator team, we're able to keep it under control. But we're only human, and it's starting to get really frustrating, so we've tightened access to the Blogs for ALL new memberships.

Here are the details:
New members register as usual
They are hit with reCapcha! to prove themselves human (or in many cases, really well programmed AI bots)
They are then compared against a database at www.stopforumspam.com which looks at the username, email, and IP. If the database contains any of these (within the last 45 days) then the account registration is denied.
If successful, they will now be placed in a New User permission group, which is pretty much normal registered user access to the forums, with a little bit of restriction, and then absolutely no access to the blog itself.
After the user has posted 6 times (non spammy posts) then they are moved to the Registered Users permissions and can live a wonderful life among us here.

Periodically, I intend to review the members contained in this new group and ban any obvious spammers.

For any others which are possibly human, I will contact them via PM to confirm they are in fact human, and process the account accordingly.

I understand some people don't want to post in the forums, and that's fine.

Cheers

 

A new feature has been added. If a thread you have subscribed to has any activity on it (new posts) then it will appear as a Notification at the top of the screen.

Yay or Nay?

 

Hmm yeh I wish the notifications tray was more functional/customisable. It's very good in Xenforo, natively, but I haven't found anything that does it as well for vB.

I'll gauge the response in general and see if it's worth keeping. Admittedly, all the notification does is provide a link to your subscribed threads in your control panel anyway, not direct to the post.