Likely forum upgrade soon (Fall, 2012)

[|iR|Focalor]

Well shit my pants and call me Sheila. It's Eyestrain, back from the dead! Welcome back.

[ex]

I'm surprised this site gets hit with 50 spam accounts per day!  That's amazing and ridiculous.  But an upgrade would work for sure...I know WORM @ ACME was having to ban accounts for a while there and switched his forum to admin-validation only because of the problem.

Will the posts from here be preserved, or will it be wiped out with a fresh start?

[VaeVictis]

I'm surprised this site gets hit with 50 spam accounts per day!  That's amazing and ridiculous.  But an upgrade would work for sure...I know WORM @ ACME was having to ban accounts for a while there and switched his forum to admin-validation only because of the problem.

Will the posts from here be preserved, or will it be wiped out with a fresh start?

he already answered that question

[quadz]

I'm surprised this site gets hit with 50 spam accounts per day!  That's amazing and ridiculous.

Almost 90 in the past 24 hours.

But an upgrade would work for sure...I know WORM @ ACME was having to ban accounts for a while there and switched his forum to admin-validation only because of the problem.

We've been set to admin-approval on registrations for years now.  But we used to just see a couple spammer registration attempts per day.  Now there are 3 pages to wade through since yesterday (30 per page.)


Unfortunately, the forum upgrade hasn't gone well so far.  (I'm preflighting the upgrade in a separate account, and seprate database, so as not to break the existing forum.)

I spent most of my Saturday yesterday trying to debug the forum upgrade script, which either fails with "Error: Unknown Error", or just stops responding entirely.  I now have maximum SQL logging and PHP function tracing enabled, and I'm still not sure what its problem is.

[X'tyfe]

Awesome, glad to see this happening. The forum software is pretty outdated, aside from the spammers

I'm sure if we lose a few "specific" posts/accounts no one will notice

[adz1La]

yours..

[Zeppelin]

who runs those spam bots and what they do??

[quadz]

who runs those spam bots and what they do??

These days it seems there are humans involved at some level. As though someone is paying people in india, pakistan, etc. to register.  (Or people located wherever. They're using proxies. Their abilities with English seem to vary.)

If you mod the registration process so that they have to post a reason for joining, they'll write things like "to have fun and make friends", or "i like it", or "Buy nike dunk sb shoes", etc. Sometimes they'll be surprisingly direct and write, "to post links".

Which is basically what they do.  If you allow them to register, they'll change their profile to add commercial links in "home page" and their "signature" fields.  One guy the other day posted a similar link in the shoutbox.  Sometimes they'll make actual posts on the forum, often generic replies to an existing thread like, "I agree with what is said above, but sometimes I like to wait and see." (And maybe they'll finish the post with a really generic anecdote of some kind.)  And they'll mark up various words in their post with links to whatever commercial site they're pimping.

Basically someone is paying these drones to do "SEO".  (Search Engine Optimization)

http://dilbert.com/strips/comic/2012-02-17

[|iR|Focalor]

who runs those spam bots and what they do??

These days it seems there are humans involved at some level. As though someone is paying people in india, pakistan, etc. to register.  (Or people located wherever. They're using proxies. Their abilities with English seem to vary.)

So you suspect for each of these bullshit accounts, there is an actual person on the other end? Is there a way to include that "captcha" junk along with the registration process? You know, the one that has the 5 or 6 character verification code with the letters and numbers all mangled and warped on a camo background thats so hard to read, you're basically forced to hit the little refresh button 20 times until you get a code that you can actually read?

[Zeppelin]

The forum looks nice and clean!!
Only need a shoutbox and its perfect 

[|iR|Focalor]

Can we get something besides rainbow colored butterflies for the post count ranky thingies? I mean... come on.

Calendar works now. Now I can see how old and close to death everyone is. Especially Recycled. I bet he's got tennis balls on the legs of his walker to keep from scuffing the floors.

[Zeppelin]

Can we get something besides rainbow colored butterflies for the post count ranky thingies? I mean... come on.

Calendar works now. Now I can see how old and close to death everyone is.

replace the msn butterflies with some beer icons 

[quadz]

Can we get something besides rainbow colored butterflies for the post count ranky thingies?

Haha, I've barely seen what anything looks like yet.

Hadn't noticed those things, dunno why they're there instead of stars.  Ohhh.. I had hacked the old forum to use some speech icon that was the old AIM or MSN icon or something...

l;akjsdflkngl;kdjfls

anyway

took most of the weekend and an all-nighter just to get the blasted thing working at all

heading to bed...

[adz1La]

butterflies look good on you breh

[The Happy Friar]

Holy goat crap it looks different...

I'm still liking the old look (not so many of the damn curvy edges, I like clean edges) but I'll get used to it.