Keeping out Spammers

[linder]

Hal,

If you are interested, I will keep you posted. They have released a new vBulletin 3.7 release candidate yesterday and it looks really cool. We'll switch to 3.7 when it goes gold.

Friedrich

[MorningFlight]

Friedrich,

Very much so, thank you. I visit your forum a couple of times a week. The absence of spammers will tell me when it's time to switch.

Hal Heindel
http://www.printshopmakeover.com

[linder]

Hal,

<G> I hope it's soon

Friedrich

[MorningFlight]

Friedrich,

Just a quick update. Wish I could tell you that your spammers are gone, but ...

I did buy and download vBulletin, put up a new web site, installed vB, and had it running in less than an afternoon. Their documention is superb, which I suppose is mainly where the money goes.

In the meantime, I managed to get the speed issue resolved with my existing phpBB 2.0.6 forum. For the time being, at least. That's a good thing, because as easy as it is to start a new forum, getting your existing mySql database transferred and converted is more cumbersome than I have time for. Trying to do it with a restore (an sql text dump) is a no-go. You need to download the entire mySql database. Good luck getting the ISP's approval and help with that. Even if you do everything right (and there's a lot to do right), the forum software providers warn you there's no assurance of success. Terrific!

So here is where I stand: I now have a vBulletin 3.6.9 forum that I won't be using for a while. In fact, I'll probably uninstall it when 3.7.0 goes Gold and then install that. While I was at it, I also installed a free phpBB 3 forum with BlueHost, the same ISP who is hosting my vB forum, just to get a side-by-side comparison. No regrets buying vB, mind you. In light of the time and effort required to convert and transfer forums, $160 is chump change. This time, I'll be extremely selective who I go to bed with.

Meanwhile, I'll keep running my phpBB 2.0.6 forum. That ISP has acknowledged they've had problems and promises to increase mySql capacity. We'll see.

My biggest beef is that none of the forum software providers, at least to my knowledge, offer any means of converting the highly valuable and irreplaceable contents of a commercial forum into some sort of hard copy, be it a .CHM Help file or an Acrobat .pdf. I've had to spend nearly two days manually copying and pasting my forum into a Help & Manual project. It will probably take me another week or more to format that project, but at least the contents of the Morning Flight Forum will finally no longer be at the mercy of an ISP.

There are days when we don't know whether we're coming or going. Other days, it just doesn't matter. To quote from W.C. Field's tombstone: "On the whole, I'd rather be in Philadelphia!" This has been one of those weeks.

Hal Heindel
http://www.printshopmakeover.com

[linder]

Hi Hal,

To be honest, I really like your idea of converting forum messages to PDF or CHM. Hmm, I like it very much!!! And from the technical point of few, it should not be too hard to implement this.

By the way, you'll get a free update from vBulletin 3.6.9 to 3.7 so the money is not "lost"

We have re-enabled some spam blocking and spam messages decreased by 70%.

Friedrich

[MorningFlight]

Hi Friedrich,

You're right, archiving forum contents into book form wouldn't be difficult. After all, it only amounts to converting threads into chapters and then extracting the individual posts from a MySql database. Hardly rocket science. Maybe Alex at H&M in Austria . . . ?

I don't consider the money spent on vBulletin wasted by any means. Getting the free upgrade to 3.7 just sweetens the pie. Haven't needed their support yet, but from what I can gather at the vB Forum, it's excellent (not as outstanding as yours , of course, but well worth the $160).

Speaking of support, do you ever sleep?

Hal Heindel
http://www.printshopmakeover.com

[linder]

Hi Hal,

You're right, archiving forum contents into book form wouldn't be difficult. After all, it only amounts to converting threads into chapters and then extracting the individual posts from a MySql database. Hardly rocket science. Maybe Alex at H&M in Austria . . . ?

That would not be too bad

I don't consider the money spent on vBulletin wasted by any means. Getting the free upgrade to 3.7 just sweetens the pie. Haven't needed their support yet, but from what I can gather at the vB Forum, it's excellent (not as outstanding as yours , of course, but well worth the $160).

Speaking of support, do you ever sleep?

Sleep is for wimps! <g> Just kidding! I am working hard on SetupBuilder 7. And I have an expensive little daughter, so I have to work around the clock

Friedrich

[MorningFlight]

Hi Friedrich,

I just received notice from vBbulletin that version 3.7.0 is now available for downloading. I was hoping for more robust spam prevention, but from what I can tell, their idea of prevention is still remedial after the fact. That's not going far enough.

Until vBulletin can come up with a system that prevents trash from getting posted in the first place, I'll keep using my free phpBB. I mean, how difficult can it be? They now have a slick set of tools for cleaning out the trash, but what I don't find is a simple mechanism that let's me approve new members before they can dump their garbage. The way I can with my phpBB Mod.

BTW, I'm nearly done converting our forum into a PDF manual, one topic at a time. The spam attack last month was actually a blessing in disguise. Rereading all the posts made me aware how much valuable information and irreplaceable testimonials had been at the mercy of a bunch of moronic low lives.

What I ended up doing is copy each topic into Notepad to strip out most of the formatting and all the graphic bits picked up from the forum. From there, I pasted the text into Help & Manual templates. Not a trivial job, but worth it. I'll let you know when the finished book is on-line.

All the best,

Hal Heindel
www.printfire.com

[linder]

Hi Hal,

Hmm, that would be bad news. We have downloaded vBulletin 3.7.0. now and plan to install the new version this night. I'll let you know if the new spam features make a difference.

We are still brainstorming the Forum to PDF idea (more than 10,000 threads to convert). There should be a way to read the information out of the SQL database and then write it to PDF.

And I am experimenting with the wonderful PageSnip software (my friend Charles Edmonds wrote it).

http://www.pagesnip.com/

Friedrich

[MorningFlight]

We are still brainstorming the Forum to PDF idea (more than 10,000 threads to convert). There should be a way to read the information out of the SQL database and then write it to PDF.

Hi Friedrich,

Absolutely. Either out of the database or from the text dump generated by MySQL when you perform a backup.

I bought PageSnip and also use SnagIt from TechSmith. Neither of the two utilities are well suited for what I had to accomplish. Unlikely as it seems, the lowly Notepad served my purpose best, mainly because it strips out everything and saves only the raw text. You can Ctrl-C whatever you see on the monitor, do a Ctrl-V dump into Notepad, and end up with plain text. All the formatting is lost as well, of course, so that's where the work comes in.

If you're interested, take a look at the results at http://www.printfire.com/MFArchiv.pdf

Trying to save 10,000 posts that way? Not in my lifetime! You'd have to be very selective in what you would want to archive.

All the best,

Hal Heindel
http://www.printfire.com