Forum functionality and restoration

[alexanderfoti]

Hi all

The forum has now been restored from a backup, after our recent issues with spammers etc.

The site is fully functional, apart from the images, which are corrupted. Once we have a copy of the original images once again, that functionality will be restored.

Alex

[Diesel Dave]

Well done, efforts are much appreciated as I know it takes a lot of time and dedication.

[alexanderfoti]

No worries at all! Glad its up and running.

[Stuart]

Nice one Alex!!

[coachgeo]

glad to see you got her up. Understand your pain well. Forum was moderating... now co-administration was getting slammed for months. Had to do ton of changes but finally got it cut to nothing.

One thing that helped is I now require new registrants to post a quick blurb somewhere in one of the forums. (a question, a say "hi"/introduction... something/anything) with in a week or so..... if not their username gets manually banned. This prevents spam bot registrations; that the spam bot detector didn't catch, from spamming the crap out of the site after a year of just sitting there dormant. This happens more than folk realize.

Admins and mods having a second user name to log on and check functionality is very helpful too. I make one and kill previous about once a month to check to see if verification emails are being sent. That has been a big problem with ours

(ambulanceRV.com)

[alexanderfoti]

Thanks!

I did add a re-captcha link to the registration page which is pretty good. I will keep an eye on new registrations for a while to see if they are just posting gibberish, and will introduce a "welcome" section, I think.

[coachgeo]

Thanks!

I did add a re-captcha link to the registration page ...

Have not found any statistics on it.... but experience so far is my own questions tend to work better than recapta. Probably only because every spam franchise see recapta as their primary opponent so they are running algorithms to decipher Recapta every second of the day.

[alexanderfoti]

Thanks will keep an eye and see what happens.

[Dan J]

Great work Alex. I was starting to worry we’d lost the ability to log in for good. If nothing else it’s given Dave time to finish that bike off

[the grinch]

Thanks for sorting it out.
Alex

[mark_in_manchester]

Thanks from me too!

[alexanderfoti]

Pictures should be back now!