[Scummvm-devel] AGI forums

Max Horn max at quendi.de
Tue Nov 9 13:29:46 CET 2010


Am 09.11.2010 um 11:51 schrieb Eugene Sandulenko:

> Hi team,
> 
> I would like to host AGI forums on our forums. I.e. now ScummVM became
> /the/ AGI interpreter, and AGI community naturally gathers around it.
> Another reason is that current AGI forums went down over again, and I
> was contacted by their guys with inquiry about such hosting.
> 
> Any objections?

No fundamental ones, though there is one thing I want to say about our forums in general: We are still stuck with phpBB 2, mostly due to the theme. This version has not received any security fixes for quite some time now and is not being developed anymore.

Besides the obvious security problem, spam control is pretty limited in phpBB 3. We currently have a bit over 10,000 registered users; I estimate that a big percentage of these are spammers (often used for only 1-2 spam messages, than not abandonded), or inactive accounts that never posted.

It's far too easy for spammers to register on the board, and difficult to consistently flag & ban spammers (it can be done, but e.g. Eugene and me apparently did it differently for some time).

Our moderator team is doing an outstanding and amazing job on keeping the forum spam free, I must. Really impressive, thanks folks!
But I wonder if we could make their life a bit easier with more advanced spam fighting tools? Of course, no tool (at this time) can really help with *human* spammers. But, say, something which replaces the "Deleted topics" subforum hack would be cool. Currently, when a mod has detected a spam message, they need to split the thread it is in, moving the spam messages to the "deleted topics" forum; later admins have to wade through there and ban spammers; which is done usually only on repeated offenders, simply because it is quite some work).
I'd like to see a simple "mark this message as junk" button which mods can use on a message, presto. And which would properly keep the context of the alleged spam message, just in case we need to review the "is spam" decision. And then a feature which allows listing all spam messages, and their authors, quickly finding other messages by the same author (so one can check whether they are spam, too). And then a button for mods or admins to mark a users as "spammer", which would automatically take care of banning the user and would also automatically flag them as "banned due to spamming" (right now we manually move these users into a spammer user group we created just for this).


OK, long rant short message: I really would like to move to a better forum software. Maybe phpBB 3 plus addons can do that (this would make for the easiest upgrade path, too). If our forums grow even more, this will become ever more important. The only blocker is the theme. Let's search for volunteers -- or, heck, let's put out a bounty and pay somebody to do it!



Bye,
Max



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