Bulletin Board Up Again

[SubZero]

John has revamped the bulletin board as you can see. Welcome to our new members. It took MANY hours for John to go through over 15,000 "registered" users...mostly "bots" in search of propagating links for themselves. In the end only 100+ were verified real people. He has also switched to this newer version of phpBB (which contains much better filters than the original phpBB version) to avoid any inappropriate users being registered and allowing them to have inappropriate links. Once again this took a lot of time and was done to protect our users from spam etc... We really hope that this newer version of Bulletin Board will take off and lead to many great discussions about PSDC and dog-powered sports. We do apologize to any users that attempted to register and were held in a "limbo" state while the situation was being dealt with.

[CouchSibes]

Thanks, Chris.

I will be sending out e-mail to everyone who has either a legitimate (and now activated) account, or is a club member. It will discuss the issue and invite everyone to try the board again.

I am currently hosting the site myself, and based on feedback and my own reliability tests, I may decide to either continue hosting it or move it to Pair Networks, a quality hosting company that offers the kind of access I need to completely manage the site. I did not have the access at the current (soon to be old) hosting company that I really needed to clean up the mess these bots were leaving every day, nor the significant time it would have taken every day.

I apologize to those few legitimate users that I found in the massive mess of bot registrations that I hadn't activated yet. You were lost in the noise. Hopefully this software will be better but if there is an issue now I have the control I need to fix it.

[CouchSibes]

April 16, 2009: I've done some work on the bulletin board (forum). E-mail should make it out to you correctly now when you try to register. I am still manually approving memberships but I will now be notified when you register and I should respond fairly quickly.

I'll be adding some more advance anti-spammer tools to the phpBB software and attempt to open the forum to self-registration without my approval once I am satisfied that it is keeping spammers out for the most part. Spam has been an issue since we started offering a bulletin board and I have erred on the side of caution since this is a "family" site and some of the spam is advertisements for things that are not very pleasant.

I encourage you to register and use the forum if you like.

I also have built a mail server and added a members' mailing list. This list will only be allowed to be used by club officials and organizers to notify members of very important information regarding events and the club; it is a low volume list and you should only expect to see mailings a few times a year. I will be posting more soon about this list, but if you are a member and would like to be added to the list please drop me e-mail to notify me and I will add you.

I am also considering adding a "members chat" mailing list that members can freely use to post to other members and am curious about feedback on the idea. This would augment the forum functionality as more of a "push" delivery as opposed the "pull" idea behind the bulletin board (forum). Members who would want to be included would have to "opt-in" or subscribe. What do you think? Send me e-mail at john@pennsleddogclub.com.

[CouchSibes]

The "question and answer" security addition I've made to the bulletin board (forum) seems to be keeping the spam registrations out, so I've enabled self-activation on the forum. You should be able to register and activate your account without waiting for me now.