Flood Control

[Midnight Modding]

Should I be doing a flood control check for all forms? While glancing through IPS ones, so far I only see it done in relation to editor inputs and I noticed of course some check related to searching.

I assume for searching, it will automatically take care of that for us. In past versions, I set up my own flood control and I think I generally used it on some forms and searching, myself.

The only actual flood control method I see, so far, though, specifically checks last post, so it obviously wouldn't be relevant to other apps if used exactly as it is now. We can't really use member_last_post ourselves, for this purpose, can we? Isn't that tied to stats related specifically to posting in a topic? Would be extra nice if a column were used only in relation to flood control, that we could update. Which, obviously not that hard to add a column myself, but anyway. I've never been sure how important flood control for forms is. I just figured form submitting, like searching, is a situation where someone can cause a tad more annoyance with constant submitting to lock up tables etc...

[bfarber]

This is a business logic decision only you can answer. We don't have flood control on every single form; we add it when we feel there's a legitimate need.

[Midnight Modding]

ok, I just also was confused about it seemingly done in the editor form elements, whereas I would have thought it would be checked either before form display or during the actual $values = $form->values check to give a general form->error. But I havent played with it, so maybe it's obvious once I test it.

Was I wrong that member_last_post was for mroe than flood control concerns? Searching in the files, I don't see that in any html template, so it must not be the column used to actually "list" last post info, after all? Looks to me like it's for flood control.

[bfarber]

member_last_post stores the member's last post timestamp. It's used for several things (flood control, bulk mail/group promotion filters, AdminCP stats, and so on).

[Midnight Modding]

I guess I should make my own column, but since it's recommended not to add a column to the members table, that will be a tad of a mess. I guess on upgrade I will make a new row in my new table (member stats table) and then use MemberSync to create one for new members and then add the flood control column there. Although, since I have seen that existing column used for different types of posting, I assume it still wouldn't create a problem using that one. If it's used for stats, it already couldn't be a stat based on last actual post in a topic, due to it not always used that way, I assume.