The WoS Forum has been running for several years now, and unfortunately that means the revolting scum who lurk in every corner of the internet trying to sell us fake shit we don't want have long since discovered its existence and sent its nasty little bots in. In a typical month, a handful of genuine new users trying to sign up will be swamped by somewhere in the region of 700-800 Viagra spammers and assorted other fucking cunts of a similar stripe.

Since it takes a lot longer to delete their auto-spam posts and block their accounts than it does to just not let them in in the first place, all new applications to WoS have to be manually verified by me, and to be honest I'm a bit slack about it, because it's such a tedious pain to wade through dozens of new accounts every day trying to figure out which ones might be real people. This can result in absurd delays as long as 14 days before your account can get approved, by which time you obviously might have got bored of waiting and gone off somewhere else.

HOWEVER, there's a very easy way to get your account approved straight away. If you simply go here:

http://worldofstuart.excellentcontent.com/contactwos.htm

and send me any sort of message that indicates you're a real person, your account will be immediately approved and activated. Sorry for the hassle of the extra step, but if I have to spend all of my day chasing after spammers and cleaning up their mess, WoS will suffer and become something that isn't worth joining up to anyway.

Incidentally, as an example of how WoS might look if I didn't restrict validation, here's an example.

A few weeks ago I was playing around with a couple of forums, idly considering moving WoS over to one with better features (since the userbase is rather smaller now, it would have been just about practical to move everyone's accounts by hand, so people wouldn't have to go through the rigmarole of joining again).

I quickly abandoned the one below for having a rubbish control panel or something, and after a couple of hours' initial setup work and one test post, I forgot all about it. The address was never published anywhere, nothing links to it, to all intents and purposes the internet has never heard of it. Take a look at it today, just six weeks after creation:

http://worldofstuart.forumsdot.com/viewfor...7980019ee3151d5



(NB I didn't set it up to have all the topics on one page, I just changed that today to more easily illustrate this point...)

Hmm, they are offering some decent balance transfer deals though.

I think I'll join....

I love the Internet.

One huge, unplanned social experiment that proves conclusively that people are cunts. Not all of them, just enough to ruin everything for everybody.

Luckily, we've also been running free-market economic systems as long-term control experiments, and they keep coming up trumps, too.

Can you not fuck about with the information required for registration, and ask them a basic maths question as part of the registration? That tends to get rid of a good percentage of nasty spammers.

Nope. The only options are no validation, self-validation and manual validation. That's partly why I was looking for a new forum.

Ooo, you don't want to start a forum that requires any kind of user validation. That's a sure sign that you must be up to some kind of illicit evil. You bastard, you.

I can see why you'd be interested in setting up a newer, more featureful forum that's entirely free, and phpBB is a decent choice. It's also available easily enough from your own server hosting, but considering how much traffic I imagine the forum gets, even with a reduced userbase, you might be best sticking with a free option, aye.

That said, if you wanted to try and have validation that suits you, you're going to need your own forum software running on your own server, really.

How about CAPTCHA validation, or does that not do it for you?

I like the invisionfree setup we have here. There's loads of history and stuff. Thousands upon thousands of nuggets of video game and general wisdom to search through.

...if the Search worked.

I'd be happy with Captcha, if there was any way of integrating it into Invision.

Not into this here Invision. Unless you can somehow upgrade the software by purchasing some 'Premium' version, or something?

If it would be any help, I've spent ages recently playing around with the software available as 'scripts', and that which I've simply down/uploaded and installed myself, on Canaca, so if you've any questions about any of that, I'd be happy to assist if I can.

As far as I know, InvisionFree allowed Dr. A to transform his InvisionFree forum into a new-fangled Zetaboards forum (complete with working search!).

You could ask him how it went, and if it has CAPTCHA. (He doesn't have it enabled, but that doesn't mean it doesn't have one)

Zetaboards has working search now? I did not know that.

It's worth noting that builtin captchas do nothing to defeat spambot signups. You either want an audio captcha, or a simple question.

So us human beings dick around tapping those letters in for nothing? fuck.

Hehe yeah.

I think there are better ones that are more effective, but those aren't generally the ones that come built-in to forum software.

It's the cats on rapidshare that really piss me off, I cant fucking see them! If I see a rapidshare link I dont bother downloading the file simple as.

How so?

Rapidshare stopped using the cats some time ago, didn't they?

I've not seen them in ages, anyway.

Some CAPTCHAs are too basic. If you're going to use one, make sure it's properly bastardly hard to make out. Audio CAPTCHA and questions are all well and good, but probably aren't built in by default into any free generic forum software.

Spamsters have developed software to read the obscured characters.

I definitely mentioned this.

Do Zetaboards offer any kind of Wordpress integration for Stu, though?

They offer 'name the Queen track' as an audio captcha.

A while back, XFM had a Queen game on their site. The aim was to recognise Queen tracks as quickly as possible.

In the mix were a bunch of solo tracks and unreleased bootlegs.

I was in the top 5 players for several hours.

I am PROUD.