Time to create moderated, approfed account login

[Neotrope]

Hi, folks....
as you can see yet another SPAMMER has created an account yesterday and posted spam in this forum.

I have revisited my opinion on making this a public forum, and perhaps we should change this to having a public area for customer questions, and private area for paid customers, after all.

We definitely need to upgrade the security settings to hold new user postings for moderation, or something.

Evil doers will only multiply.

[daveesq]

I'd have to disagree with this simply because potential customers (e.g., me) would very much like to see what actual customers (i.e., regular users) of the Solaris have to say about it, what problems they come across, and what they create with it.

I fully understand the spammer problem, but I think that the atmosphere created by Mr. Bowen's openness throughout the development process would suffer from a "members only" forum. In my mind, the most reasonable solution is simply good policing of what goes on, which has proved to be the case thus far.

David

[Neotrope]

my suggestion was not to make the entire forum private...


I have revisited my opinion on making this a public forum, and perhaps we should change this to having a public area for customer questions, and private area for paid customers, after all.

Of course, anything which helps sells units is a good thing

[daveesq]

Oh, I know that you didn't intend to make everything private. I just meant that if you have a private area, a lot of potentially relevant information will potentially be missed by people who haven't yet made the commitment to purchase.

[valis]

If the issue is related to spam & nonsense posting, the correct answer imo though is to have a few of the most active people moderate with email reporting buttons on posts and stagger that across timezones if possible.

This forum is a bit out of date now though as phpbb2 is no longer maintained, and so any anti-spam/captcha tweaks I do only keep the spam bots at bay (people can still manually sign up and spam.) We ban ip/email and many standard hosts but of course that's still going to go into infinite regression once a site hits any appreciable size.

There is a phpbb3 upgrade imminent which will address things to a certain degree, the only reason it isn't here yet is because the Solaris colors have changed through the last 2 years and I think when Solaris is released the site itself will get some updating. The phpbb3 installation & templating were going to be done at the same timeframe so if we were to choose to move sooner the site might have to use a default template for a while...

To create a separate are that requires 'purchased user' flags is also easy as that's just a group permissions thing regardless of forum software used, and is entirely between you guys & JB (ie, at his discretion if he thinks there's a reason for his customers to have that.) A separate forum entirely isn't necessary imo...