Com-Central.net

Dear George & Doug,


it's actually sad that your excellent forum had to moved. I liked the 'old' one more, than this 'new' one here (it has too much diverting, flickering stuff in every corner, IMHO). And apparently a few people cannot access it and/or post any more! That's - to say the least! - very shameful...


AFAIK, the old one was (still is!) operating with "WebBBS 5.12.". The following statement can be found in its FAQ:


"(3) How can I prevent certain individuals from posting on my BBS?


Unfortunately, you can't. There is no way to identify visitors to your Web site unless they voluntarily provide you with their identities, so there's no way to prevent certain specific visitors from posting. The best you could do would be to ban particular IP numbers. However, since most systems use dynamic IP addressing, a given user won't always have the same number; thus, in order to keep the visitor away, you'd have to ban everyone from his ISP. Obviously, in the case of larger ISPs such as AOL, that's not even remotely practical. As well, if an individual has more than one access account, even banning an entire ISP won't necessarily get rid of him.


The only practical way to keep unwanted visitors from posting is to only allow certain visitors to post.


<b><u>One way to do this is to password-protect your BBS. This can be done by placing the script files within a password-protected directory, and controlling access to that directory via any of the multitude of programs available for the purpose.


A slightly less "secure" but somewhat simpler method of controlling access is to set WebBBS to require profiles and e-mail addresses. No one will be able to post without first creating a profile, and valid e-mail addresses will be required with those profiles. So while you won't necessarily be able to prevent someone from posting (at least not the first time), you will be able to track down exactly who you're dealing with..</b></u>


Short of limiting who can post, your only real alternative -- shared by all of us -- is to simply ignore the occasional twits and hope they go away quickly."


(Source:http://awsd.com/scripts/faqs/webbbs.shtml & > (3))


Perhaps one of the above mentioned solutions (either the password or the users' profiles) could help to prevent those SPAM messages, and that way 'we' could keep using "the internet's probably best armor forum" at the known afvnews.ca address!?

Hope this helps.

Regards,
André Flener

P.S.: Or maybe a small petition thread posted in both discussion boards would give an idea which one the majority would like to use!?

Andre,
Interesting points, and would have been all the more useful had somebody, anybody, made them a few weeks ago. For sure there was no ideal solution, but this one readily presented itself and it seemed we were losing participants anyway, to judge by some of the posts and messages received regarding the impact the "intrusions" were having. ( I would hope that most of you never saw it, but I personally deleted something like 300 spams or more in the last three weeks, and I had help from Geoff and George!...no telling what the total really was). By the way, the spamming continues and I'm still deleting them in order to keep the "annoucement" at the top of the page...and it's not easy, I can tell you. I've observed on occasion as many as 3-4 spam messages within a minute.

As for reopening the issue regarding which forum to use, that is, and always has been 100% Georges call. I have no more influence over this than you or anyone else does. He's the owner, and I am "but an instrument of his will" in this matter. The only reason I'm even moderating this forum is because I was already a participant and moderator at Com-Central and "knew the neighborhood"...and it's "rules". I would suggest though, that adaptation to something new is always a challenge, and we might give this more of a chance here. I know that in any case, I'm extremely grateful to the hosts at Com-Central for offering us a home and doing it quickly....and for free (certainly a consideration).

As to applying your (or anybody's) solutions to the old forum, there are a couple of considerations in that regard that I'm not comfortable discussing publically, so will defer to George as to whether or not even to bring it up.