Forum software upgraded...

Hey, all,

We upgraded the forum software tonight to proactively take care of some security issues and add some additional functionality (though I have no idea what exact features or functionality was added!)

If anyone notices any problems or weirdness please let me know.

Thanks!

 

I see that we now have the ability to create and edit tags.

 

There seems to be a sudden new wave of advertising posts, perhaps machine generated. I don't know if it's related to the software changes.

 

Could someone explain what a tag is (or does) - I've noticed this on another site I frequent.
Thanks.

 

Tags can make it easier for me to search for info.

 

<sigh>. There was an anti-spam add-on to vbulletin that was installed, which required, during registration, answering a question that a bot (or a ten-cent an hour worker from India) would not know the answer to. Unfortunately, the new software broke the add-on, so we're temporarily getting more spam registrations.

We're going to solve the problem in the next several days, either by fixing the anti-spam thing or (possibly) by requiring that all new posters have their first few posts moderated. Sorry for the noise.

 

Chip,

Have you looked at ReCaptcha? I've had great success with it on my blog, reducing spams from dozens, sometimes hundreds, a day to one every other month or so. Whatever you do, you have my sympathy - why spammers think it's their God-given right to spew unrelated junk onto forums and blogs, not to mention email inboxes, I'll never know.

 

My favorite from yesterday was the spam thread about software to create spam.

 

That must've been good for a laugh! Do you have a link?

 

This could be a temp solution.

 

I'm familar with ReCaptcha but it never occurred to me to use it for DegreeInfo! Great idea... we're working on several things right now, but we should definitely at least give it a try.

 

Well, it turns out that the current version of VBulletin actually directly supports ReCaptcha... all I had to do is find it in the now-voluminous control panel for VBulletin and turn it on and configure it (which I've done.)

And I also found a current version of the NoSpam add-on so that's back up and working as well. With luck, that will slow the spammers to a crawl, and there are a bunch of other things I'm currently working on to further restrict them.