Tara asked about access to the forum in the comments to the previous post, so I thought this would be a good time to open a discussion on what to do about the Reader Network in general. Basically, I finally had to close down the forum because it was being totally spammed and I couldn’t figure out how to keep it from happening, i.e. as administrator/moderator, I could catch individual posts before they went up but not necessarily keep the spammers from gaining some access to email information, which I find totally weird for a supposedly good forum program and phpBoards is suposedly one. If someone knows something I don’t, speak up and we’ll see what we can do.
In the meantime, as I told Tara, the posts already created are still there. I’m simply hesitant to open the forum back up until we solve the security problem. Past that, we do need to decide whether to continue to using that forum program, find another one with better features or discontinue the idea altogether.
I just want everyone to know that I’m not opposed to continuing. I simply need your input on how to proceed. Ideas? Suggestions?
May: I have no idea what it means but it did/does worry me. Even with it completely shut down and membership registration set to admin approval first, there were still “members” on the list that were spammers when I checked today. And I do not remember even seeing emails on a couple of them! That’s just an example of why I finally just shut it down during the summer.
OTOH, the new update that I downloaded today seems to have a different registration procedure so maybe registration won’t be the problem it was. Crossing my fingers.
What’s worrying me is that you’re saying that even when it’s set that you need to approve every member, they are still managing to become members without your approval. That probably means it’s being hacked, right?
Meljean: It’s been a while since I looked at it but I’m pretty sure I tried just about everything to block them out. The strange thing was that even when I set membership needing my approval, they’s still show up on the list before I did it. And the email I get about approving someone new has a very weird wording to it. Maybe I need to recheck and see if my provider has updated the version of the board for downloading.
Mailyn: Yes, I do but I see it more as being a joint project with other readers. We just haven’t been doing much with it since the beginning of the summer.
Tara: No, you’re not being pushy. I’m just being lazy. ;p BUT, it’s something I need to deal with and was actually planning on getting around to dealing with about now. I just hadn’t thought of it yet, so thanks for reminding me. I’ll try to find time today to go in and recheck settings and see if I can open it up on an extremely limited basis until we can figure this out. If I do, I’ll post an update in a new post.
Is it possible to make the forum invitation only? I know this is a little severe, but it would protect from the joy of spammers.
Can you open it for a couple of days so I can access some of the info?? Am I being too pushy? Probably–LOL.
Didn’t know you had your own forum! That’s cool. I don’t think I could handle all that coding. LOL.
Hi Bev — I’m not sure what kind of setup you have already, but they might be accessing the e-mail info once they register, because typically, in a phpBB, once users are registered they can look at the other users’ info — like the e-mail. This is what we do over at the comic fan forum I administrat on phpBB, and the spam has been pretty low.
I don’t know if you have to approve every member who registers, but that might be a solution. (I think the default setting is automatic approval.) If the board is set so that only users can post, and the admins have to approve every user before they are activated (so that you have to send them an e-mail and get a real response in return before you activate them) it would be a little more time consuming for you or the other admin, but might keep some of that out.