SPAM

[Turbofurball]

I used to run a site using the same software for many years ... manual approval is the way to go TBH. That said, this software is also ancient and full of holes, I guess the only reason it hasn't been hacked already is because it's so niche.

[RobThom]

I used to run a site using the same software for many years ... manual approval is the way to go TBH. That said, this software is also ancient and full of holes, I guess the only reason it hasn't been hacked already is because it's so niche.

I'm not a coder or webmaster, but I'm pretty sure this bulletin board software is an old one.
I've been seeing this layout around before for 15+ years.
And you don't see it too often anymore except on old original websites.

I'm assuming that spam accounts are being registered with some kind of script.
They're not going to do each one individually by hand.
It must be a weak registering process that they've figured out how to hack by now.

phpbb.com seems to have a support section and this cant be just a problem only here.
I'd ask them what other people have done to deal with spam and registration.

Or just do like you said, plain old fashioned manual approval.
It would have to be easier to manually approve new Mad Max fans and they drift in then manually cleaning up the mess behind an army of bots.

[Turbofurball]

This version is from something like 2012 if I remember correctly (when the default theme moved the avatar pictures over to the right for some reason). In software terms that is ancient, lol

[TheDarkOne#1]

It’s indeed a sad thing to see the forum in this state. I don’t know if it’s time/money related but i hope Peter will someday chip in on this. Maybe ask for donations to put towards a forum upgrade?

Alot of forums are struggling as social media has taken over their role. Which is odd in some cases because facebook has no real structure. I’m a member on a few car related forums. Everything from diy, project sections and buy/sell threads are nicely organised. Try finding a certain subject on a facebook page from 2 weeks ago, it’s a nightmare.

I’m totally onboard with having a stricter registering process.

[AquaCola]

Even finding posts from several hours ago can be a lengthy process on Facebook. There are some good Mad Max groups on Facebook with a lot of members but that unfortunately means a lot of dopes just looking to argue for no reason and give out endlessly about Fury Road.

I've always loved forums and would love to see people using them more again.

[Turbofurball]

Agreed, I only use Facebook to keep in contact with a handful of friends who live far away, and to see when my biker group are going out for a ride together ... compared to a forum with good contributors and history (like this one) it's useless for anything to do with specialist subjects.

If the owner here is no longer contactable, a consensus of current active members might be needed to move to a new board, since that sort of thing often falls flat on it's face. Heck, if I'm in a settled place next winter I might even give it a shot, as it would be a shame if this site just ground to a halt due to technical reasons with no popular replacement.

[Taipan]

This forum is not going away, its hosting is paid until sometime in 2020 and after that Peter will keep it going. He was inactive however for personal reasons.
The issue with spam here was just a matter of changing the security question to something new since spam bots figured out the old ones and now there's no spam at all which is a good thing. But that's forums, let's talk the site itself.

The main issue with the site is that it's really old and it was handmade so to speak. This makes updating it a very tedious job, it's not like Wordpress where you can drag and drop things and it just works. I talked to Peter about revamping the entire site and getting it up to speed with 2018 standards but I don't think that's an option at this moment, mostly because Peter is preoccupied with other things.

I was thinking of taking it upon myself to redo the entire site in Wordpress, basically making a carbon copy of this site but built around Wordpress, so the inner workings would make it easier to update this site frequently. It doesn't seem like a difficult job because it's mostly a question of carrying over information from this site to the new one. This idea has been going on in my head for a while now and something tells me that eventually I'll try and do that, just for the hell of it.

[Turbofurball]

That's good news

It's worth going to a modern structure, especially since you can integrate forums with a CMS and thus pull things from one to the other, having rolling updates, etc etc. (my personal preference used to be Joomla, but that was a while ago, lol)

[roadwarriormfp]

I was thinking of taking it upon myself to redo the entire site in Wordpress, basically making a carbon copy of this site but built around Wordpress, so the inner workings would make it easier to update this site frequently. It doesn't seem like a difficult job because it's mostly a question of carrying over information from this site to the new one. This idea has been going on in my head for a while now and something tells me that eventually I'll try and do that, just for the hell of it.

Theres certainly a lot of info which could be added or updated on the actual website area.