You may find your Fan base growing emmensly in the next few

[Fart_Plume]

You may find the VS fan base growing emmensly in the next few days. I just was allowed permission on the largest computer tech forum on the net Xtremesystems.org in the Gaming section. There are 80,000 members there so I hope this exposure to this great game helps.

[loki1950]

You may not have noticed it but new members is kinda rare ATM as we can't send confirmation e-mails to the activated ones sourceforge did a data centre move last week and we where down for a few days till ace123 got us back on-line but there are still things that are not working e-mail notifications(for posts,PM's and activation) does not work and proper editing of the wiki so we are crippled so you might mention that so we don't offend those new visitors.

Enjoy the Choice

[Fart_Plume]

they'll understand, XS just underwent a server move itself, and was completely down for 3 days. We now have a four socket (16 cpu core)apple server and a matching backup server. nad aseparate frontpage server(keeps the site from being hacked).

if any of you want to join XS here is a link:http://www.xtremesystems.org/forums/... ... erid=59321
If you have any kind of techincal questions about computer hardware this is the place to go.

They also have coding sections,but they need guys like the VS people to help them out. Just not enough experienced coders on the XS site. mostly hardware guys and Overclockers.

[Testing Account]

I have disabled forum activation.

We'll probably get a lot more spam now, but it is worth that in favor of blocking our community to people who are already registered.


We can maybe ask tougher questions than "Are you human" on the registration page.

[loki1950]

Thx ace i guess my vacation from bot killing is over

Enjoy the Choice

[www2]

@loki1950

Yes it is bot hunting season.

[Deus Siddis]

Speaking of the server chaos of late, the fugliness of the current forum look and layout is just temporary and it will go back to the cool black spacey look (that it had until just now) sometime before the end of the year, right?

[ace123]

That is the idea. Though phpbb's site has virtually no themes for phpbb3. I'll keep searching for a good starting point.
I was getting tired and I spent the time instead fixing the wiki so you can actually edit it now.

[chuck_starchaser]

We can maybe ask tougher questions than "Are you human" on the registration page.

THAT is precisely your problem, Ace. You need to DELETE that question.
(I once sent a PM to www2 to explain to him how to make best use of textual confirmation; but never got a reply from him.)
The "Are you human?" question is THE loophole that is allowing spammers to get through.
Why?
Because 99% of the users of Textual Confirmation have that question there; and spammers know it.
So the bots have already been programmed to answer "yes" in the high chance that that's the question.
In fact, you MUST NOT have ANY questions that can be answered yes or no. Even if you have but one such question
out of 100, spammers will get through, eventually, simply by trying multiple times with yes/no answers.

So, the trick to make textual confirmation work for you is to have questions that require textual answers, like
"Name an insect that produces honey."
I could give you the questions we have at junction, but it's better if you come up with your own. If questions get around, spammers
will start catering to them.
Best would be if you came up with several sets of like 20 questions each. As soon as ONE spammer gets through, change to a
new set.

If you avoid yes and no questions, you'll block spammers almost completely.
I say "almost" because in the past 15 months or so, we did have ONE spammer get through; most likely by taking the trouble to
register manually. We immediately changed all of the questions to a new set, and no more spammers since.
I also set maximum number of consecutive registration attempts to 2, and the time to try again is at 666 minutes. This is not so
much to block a possible registration as to prevent spammers from logging my whole set of questions to analyze them off-line.
For extra measure, I deactivated self-confirmation. When someone tries to register I get notified, and I send the person an
email asking "Have you played Privateer before?", "How did you hear about us?", etceteras. I think some of them were in fact
spammers; but probably just a couple.

[ace123]

As to why I never changed it, the "are you human" question was hardcoded into a lot of places. Changing it was a lot more work than it was worth.

I decided to spend my time instead at working on getting a phpbb3 install running where it had sane defaults instead of hacking up any more of that phpbb2 code.

[pyramid]

ace123 did a great work in making the transition from phpbb2 to phpbb3. It was fo rsure tough work and he deserves all the merit and laudation we could deliver. Now it's time to reset the past, and look into the future for possible solutions to the spam problem that were not possible before. The new forum was just instatiated today. We should give ace some time to fix the visuals and spam prevention. Chuck's proposal is a good sarting point and maybe we could simply brainstorm on a set of 100 different questions that could be grouped into 5-10 each to be then swapped if a spammer get's through.

My contribution of today:
* What's the name of the xth planet of the solar system?
* How much is x times y plus z?
* What is the xth number of the Fibonacci sequence (x<20)
* What is the first name of the founder of Christianism?
* Which is the SI basic unit of thermodynamic temperature?

Preferrably it should be questions that intuitively have a unique answer, that can be looked up on the wiki, and that are from different interest fields.

@ace123
The new phpbb3 wiki is a big leap forward for our community. I know for how long you have been carring this idea of transitioning from phpbb2 to phpbb3 around with you. And I want to congratulate you for this accomplishment.

[Deus Siddis]

Yeah, sorry if I sounded ungratiful, I do appreciate the forum upgrade and the return of the wiki alot.

I only brought it up because the forums used to look white (and before that black I think) then were turned black on purpose and were now white again and I was hoping that wouldn't be intended as a long term move, but just a temporary place holder which apparently it is.

[chuck_starchaser]

Ace, what do you mean by that question being "hard-coded"? That's the standard question that comes with an anti-spam mod for phpBB called "Textual Confirmation". The mod adds a panel in the administration control panel through which you can edit the questions and answers you want. Unless it's true someone hard-coded it; but I can't imagine why someone would spend hours hard-coding that question when you can download the mod for free and install it in (3 minutes they say) ... make that 30 minutes

Pyramid, not everybody has ever heard who Fibonacci was; and it's not kosher to ask muslims and hinduists questions about christian religion; but you got the idea. It's actually pretty hard to come up with good questions. If you asked me questions about movies or sports I'd never be able to register, for example. Someone may not know that Earth is the 3rd planet. In the old set of questions for wcjunction one of the questions was "how many planets are there in the solar system?", but I accepted any number from like 3 to 20. A spambot would never get the answer anyways. But you can get the opposite problem... Once Mamiya Otaru went to join the wcjunction forum and he got the question "where did the apollo 11 go?". I had for acceptable answers moon, the moon, luna, la luna; but he answered "the sea of tranquility" and got rejected

[ace123]

Well when I was looking at it, the "Are you human?" question was hardcoded into the registration page, so I take it that question was just the default one built into PhpBB2.

I didn't really want to install anything complicated into that board--it barely worked as it was (and in a lot of cases the registration did not work).

Regardless, PhpBB3 should be more customizable and more bot-unfriendly.
And so far I haven't seen any spam threads pop up, but I'm sure we'll see some eventually in which case I will have to install some extra mods.

[pyramid]

Pyramid, not everybody has ever heard who Fibonacci was; and it's not kosher to ask muslims and hinduists questions about christian religion; but you got the idea.

The point I was trying to convey is that questions that can easily be looked up on a wikipaedia by a human (Fibonacci) are well suited to keep spam bots out, as they will not be able to parse a wikipaedia page to find the right answer.
Though, personally I would not get offended by a question "Who is the founder of Islam?", I do admit that human mind is wonderfully intricate and topics of religious content might not be the best choice.

[Fendorin]

ahahah nice question but religion is religion
anyway

in France we have a simple question/proverb for this kind of problem(i will try to translate): what is the color of the Henry IV 's white horse?: it's a really hard question for robotic .....

[loki1950]

Or the old joke "Where would you bury the survivors of a plane wreck on an International border?" that usually also separates those that actually read the question

Enjoy the Choice

[chuck_starchaser]

Ace, probably the reason you're getting a break from spammers at the moment is that the spammers' databases still have the vegastrike forum's parameters set for phpBB2 registration. As soon as they figure out you switched to 3 they'll be on the attack again. Textual confirmation (unless it is built into phpBB3) is a must-have; it's the only mod that actually stops spammers cold. Though I've got ALL anti-spam mods ever written installed in wcjunction: Spammers can fail by registering too fast, by being in the wrong time-zone, and by a dozen other ways before they even hit the Textual Confirmation thingie; and I'd highly recommend the same for you. I also have max registration attempts set to two and time to wait before trying again set to 666 minutes. Highly recommended too.
Anti-spam mods don't slow down phpBB at all, as they only kick in during registrations.

Pyramid, sure people could search the web for answers; but remember you'll have 12-year old kids registering, sometimes; --some which may happen to hate math and who stopped learning after they failed long division; you can't expect them to go look up what the Fibonacci series is in Wikipedia and understand what they read there. There's a lot of people out there that start sweating when they see a '+' sign.

[pyramid]

There's a lot of people out there that start sweating when they see a '+' sign.

Gotcha. Let's reformulate then: "How much is 1 plus one?"

[HoodedWraith]

I do admit that human mind is wonderfully intricate and topics of religious content might not be the best choice.

Agreed. While we're remarkably intricate creatures, things outside our scope of understanding may make us a little leary. Maybe asking questions about physicists and such would be a better answer.

[darkone]

I use this mod for my phpbb3 forum registration page and it works well plus I have a AJAX registration check mod installed that checks users email address mx record so it helps a bit more and I don't have any spam yet

I have links to all the mods I use on this page if this helps: http://www.spacesimcentral.com/about.php#credits

[ace123]

Unfortunately any of the cool/useful mods don't work here in Sourceforgeland because they disallow outgoing connections from the webserver. This includes both email and (I think) DNS.

The style from that board links to http://www.stargatestyles.com/ -- I can check out some of those. Do you know if it's fine to just blatantly copy someone's PhpBB style that they posted, if they have special images?