70 000 members?

[dR3]

Damn, I'm just realizing this.

I remember there were 18 000 back when I joined. Too bad the activity has decreased since then, when it should be the other way around.

[BigBoss]

They're all cancer.

[Copy Cat]

I bet half of those are bots.

[Just Silver]

wtf do bots even do

[Eedee]

wtf do bots even do

Make sure all the noobs get in the van.

[Spyder]

95 percent are bots

@silver, they advertise for random sites.

Forums can be bot free, but TR doesn't feel like sparing the mods the trouble I guess.
Nor does he want to add an email verification or simple things...
Idk if he makes money off the advertising or what

[CanadaPure]

Forums can be bot free, but TR doesn't feel like sparing the mods the trouble I guess.
Nor does he want to add an email verification or simple things...
Idk if he makes money off the advertising or what

Even forums with email verification and/or good CAPTCHA still get bots through onto the site. Not as much as this site, but it's still a regular occurrence on the other forum I moderate, and they use CAPTCHA and Email verification.

The only real way to completely avoid them is to have a moderator/admin verify the account, which is pretty much what happens here.

[Spyder]

I know but pay site forums have zero bots.
Email verification would cut the bots into tenths probably.
And we catch them after they've posted, sometimes a couple times because there's ridiculous amounts

[CanadaPure]

I know but pay site forums have zero bots.
Email verification would cut the bots into tenths probably.
And we catch them after they've posted, sometimes a couple times because there's ridiculous amounts

Yeah it certainly does cut it down a lot, I'm just saying that on most forums it's pretty impossible to get rid of them completely.

I think this site runs into a lot of issues because this forum software seems incredibly dated. If I'm not mistaken, most forums run either vBulletin or I.P. Board now. phpBB is something that doesn't seem to be used very often.

[Spyder]

yeah i see vbulletin alot

TR could shut down for a weekend and make the switch tbh

[CanadaPure]

yeah i see vbulletin alot

TR could shut down for a weekend and make the switch tbh

It took the other forum about a day and a half to make the change, it's easier if your database of members and posts is actually accessible (ours wasn't) then it's much quicker.

[AbramIsaac]

Some things I noted here, that aren't entirely correct:

1) TRShady Needs to Add Email Verification: I'm pretty sure that's already part of the system. You have to enter a valid email address to register, and in order to log in, you have to click the activation link that you receive in your confirmation email.

2) TRShady has no CAPTCHA's: This one is almost correct. The CAPTCHA system that TR has in place is very old-school. It doesn't use an image, but rather a randomly generated set of run-on words that the user is to read and provide the answer to a question about. The idea is the same as a CAPTCHA, but it doesn't use an image...which could definitely be updated.

3) TRShady Makes Money from Advertisement: I know Spyder wasn't saying this was a fact, but I did want to address it. TR makes no advertisement money at all on this forum. In order to make any money from the bots (by way of affiliate linking or something) we would actually have to allow them to post. Which we don't, so members never click these links, defeating the purpose of monetizing them at all.

TR wasn't able to even use some of the normal advertising platforms because of all of the profanity on this forum.

4) TRShady Could Make this Forum Bot-Free: As has been said by both sides, this isn't true. Updating the system could cut out quite a few of the bots, but not all. The only way to ensure that the bots don't flood the forum is by way of member confirmation, which is done by the mods.

Pay sites don't have bots, because bots don't have payment information. It doesn't make sense to pay for your botnet to spam a forum, and then get banned, all for the purpose of increasing your search engine ranking by having a botnet with thousands of links going to your site.

Since we're not going to charge for membership, the only other thing to do is post approval. As mods, we all know how we get hundreds of bot posts per week. Limiting all new thread creation to new users in the And You Are? section took care of the threads, and the posts themselves just have to be weeded out by us.

As far as the members are concerned though, we don't have a bot problem. They're not flooding the forums anymore from a user perspective, because they don't see the unapproved posts. Occasionally, you'll get a bot post through because a mod didn't take the time to read the post, but other than that, bots never actually get to post on the open forum anymore.

Conclusion: Updating the forum software would be the best thing to do. Even if we just updated the security provisions, we would improve things a bit. As far as a full migration goes, that might be easier said than done. As has been noted, it can be very easy if everything in the database is set up correctly. If it's not, we're looking at having scripts pull the data and convert it over to the new format.

SajN now has full access to the forum, and the server itself. If we can talk to him about practical solutions to our issues, I'm sure he'd be willing to implement them.

[CanadaPure]

Conclusion: Updating the forum software would be the best thing to do. Even if we just updated the security provisions, we would improve things a bit. As far as a full migration goes, that might be easier said than done. As has been noted, it can be very easy if everything in the database is set up correctly. If it's not, we're looking at having scripts pull the data and convert it over to the new format.

Depending on how this forum stores database information, as you said, it can be either either or incredibly hard to move over to new software. Many free-softwares have tonnes of issues when switching over to something you buy like vBulletin, which is the issue we had on the other forum.

That being said, TR's software is incredibly dated. I'm surprised there's no more modern updates for phpBB.

[AbramIsaac]

Definitely.

The thing is, between vBulletin and phpBB, there are serious formatting differences in the way that the data is stored. Often, you'll see forums just completely abandon the old posts and member information, and start fresh with a link to the archive and that's it.

To sites that are dedicated to making the switch, it can still be hard. You can set up scripts to crawl through everything and convert it if you need to, but even then you might only be left with the posts, and every member would have to sign up all over again.

The best thing to do is just update what we have right now as far as security provisions are concerned. There may not be sweeping updates to phpBB, but there are solutions to issues that we can implement. Some are easier than others, but all of them would be easier than a full migration.

Since TR has worked around a lot of things in this forum since the beginning, I would expect some issues in a migration.

[CanadaPure]

The thing is, between vBulletin and phpBB, there are serious formatting differences in the way that the data is stored. Often, you'll see forums just completely abandon the old posts and member information, and start fresh with a link to the archive and that's it.

Which is exactly what we did, since the website had only been up for about 3 months at the time of the software switch. The woman who owns the site had decided it would be easy to get the relatively small amount of members to move on their own to the new site. It went okay, but we still lost probably 40% of the active users at that time, which hurt us in the infant stages of the site.

Getting everyone on TR to migrate on their own would be a nightmare.