AtariAge

I would glady pay a reasonable, additional fee for this functionality. I can imagine the overhead, it's not trivial by any means. How about instead allowing forums to poll your servers periodically (say, every several hours, or even once a day) for the most recently flagged spammers? Just had a spammer get through today, first one since April. User looked innocuous enough, username/email/IP didn't register anything suspicious in Google. Spammer posted a bunch of pornographic pictures and a ton of links (in a single post). Fortunately I happened to be online and caught it within a few minutes. I'd contribute handsomely to a fund to launch spammers directly into the sun. ..Al

Finally had a chance to set this up today on my test 3.0.2 forum. I was able to setup a second Sphinx daemon on the same server without any problems (running on port 3313 instead of 3312). Seems to work well, but need to go through all the searches to make sure there are no issues. Certainly the searches I've done so far are much faster than with MySQL's engine. I would very much like to see support added to the Messenger. I have over 20,000 PMs in my Inbox and A) it takes five seconds after I click on "Messenger" for it to appear and B) searching is fairly slow. I'm not sure the first issue could be resolved by Sphinx (since you always need current results when viewing your inbox), so that will probably need to be optimized another way. But the searching could certainly benefit from Sphinx. I'd really like to see an "Advanced Search" page for the Messenger. :) Thanks again Brandon (and anyone else at IPB who's touched this) for your work on integrating this into IP.Board 3. ..Al

This would be a nice future enhancement and make this system even more useful. ..Al

Thanks! Going to set this up shortly. I'm running two character searches on my 2.3.6 forum, which has been very helpful. We actually have several relevant search terms that would otherwise be difficult to search for ("Qb" - Atari 2600 homebrew game, "ST" as in "Atari ST", and so forth..) I really wish you guys would install Sphinx here and enable three character searches, as it's really difficult to search for some terms here (such as "GDK"). ..Al

That's good to hear, thanks. :) That is what I'll be doing--I have my test forum hidden away on another domain (atariage.org instead of atariage.com), but on the same dedicated server. ..Al

Thanks, I'll try that tomorrow and see how I make out. :) When you say "at least one change", are there changes other than the search and replace you described here? ..Al

I'd like to setup Sphinx on my 3.0.2 test forum to make sure it works properly before I migrate from 2.3.6. Can anyone tell me what I need to do differently from this article so I can get it up and running without pulling my hair out? I'm running Sphinx on 2.3.6 now, so I am pretty familiar with it already. Thanks, ..Al

I concur--I use "View New Content" very frequently so this would be a welcome addition to the skin. ..Al

This would be useful information, I concur. Saves you from having to dig through the forums (and/or tracker) to hunt for a post to see if the build has indeed been updated. I believe 3.0.2 has been updated at least twice now since its initial release. ..Al

Glad to hear that, I didn't see Josh's post regarding this. :) ..Al

I agree with you, it would be nice if these were consistent. ..Al

Thanks..

Just curious, how much did those Lifetime and Perpetual licenses cost when they were available? ..Al

No offense to you, but I hope they do not charge for those of us already paying $25 every six months. I most likely would not use the service then (and I'm guessing many other regular license holders would not either). This would greatly impact the service's usefulness, since it depends on admin/moderator submitted reports from as many forums as possible. ..Al

:wub:

Is this displayed on the validation queue screen? If not, that's extra work for me to parse through, potentially slowing me down. Ideally the response code would be added to the members table (or a new table if you don't want to modify the members table) so it can be displayed in a column along with the other information when validating users. ..Al

Ultimately it would be nice to have it completely automated, as it is time consuming to manually validate many registrations throughout the course of a day. Initially I will just watch it and see how the system flags various registrations. Question for Invision: Will I be able to see on the Member Validation page how each new member is ranked according to your system? That would be extremely useful. ..Al

Yes, it will be quite interesting to see how well this works. My main concern is how quickly new spammers will be flagged as such. Right now, most spammers on my forum sign up overnight. Since I manually validate, by the time morning comes around, they may already appear in the Stopforumspam database or a Google search, giving me valuable information on whether or not to approve the accounts. With this automated system, I am concerned that if your system is hit earlier than most, the spammer will get through. It would be nice if there were options to give higher scores (higher being more likely to be a spammer) to email addresses and IP addresses located within certain countries. On my forum, addresses/IPs from China, Vietnam, India, any countries in Africa, and Russia are 99.99% spam (I've only had a rare few valid Russian registrations). I know this would need to be on the client end, since there are obviously valid forums in at least some of these countries who would want people in their own country to register. :) But anytime I see an email address ending in ".in" or the IP location is "Nigeria", I don't even waste my time going further--I immediately nuke the account. ..Al

You're right in that it is easy to randomize your username and that common usernames are not as useful. However, in my experience over the past several years, I have caught hundreds of spammers based on the username alone (and in most of those cases they are fairly unique names). When you search google for new usernames, and you see a ton of forum profiles on that name returned, that's usually a damn good sign you have a spammer. I then usually click on a few to see when the user signed up on those forums. If they were all within the last day (or week), you usually have a spammer on your hands. Even with common names, if many people suddenly report that "Bob" is a spammer, then it would be good to watch over a new member who signs up on your board with that same username. Stopforumspam.com includes usernames in their database, and I use that as a resource often. I hope you reconsider including usernames, at least as an additional data point. ..Al

I hope usernames are sent also, as more times than not this is a big red flag when I'm validating new users. Many spammers sign up on a ton of forums using the same username, where they might not be using the same IP address and/or email address. I've caught quite a few this way, so I think it's important to include the username as well as the IP and email. ..Al

I wholeheartedly agree--the main thing will be educating admins so they are aware of the feature so they'll go and turn it on. :) ..Al

Yeah, will be very interesting to see how this plays out. :D This has great potential as long as many forum admins turn it on. I assume it will be off by default? ..Al

This is great news. I hope it becomes reliable enough that I will be able to disable Admin Validation down the road. That's the only sure-fire method I've found so far of keeping spammers off my board. Looking forward to 3.0.2, which is likely the version I will use to upgrade my 2.3.6 forum. :) ..Al

I did have a few people who had problems getting pointed to the correct server, but it was a very small number overall. I blame their crappy ISPs. ;) ..Al

Good writeup, thanks. I just recently did #2 (uhrr), but I set TTL values on my domain to five minutes so that when I updated the DNS, most people saw the new server almost immediately. I did take the forum down on the old server before copying the database, but it was down for less than an hour for most people, which is acceptable for me. I've considered solutions 3 and 4, but both would have taken a bit of work (especially replication), and for my case it wasn't worth it given the forum would be down for only a short duration. My forum database is also several GB in size (plus another 20GB+ for related files), so this does require a lot of planning to do smoothly. ..Al