Forum Maintenance - Software Upgrade

[Greg Dawes]

The X1 Forums will be undergoing a software upgrade today at 3:00 pm PST and will be down for approximately 1-2 hours.

We apologize, in advance, for any problems that this may cause.

[Kenward]

Does the new forum software allow RSS?

That's how I like to track things.

Google Reader isn't picking it up any more.

[tjh]

Second Kenward's query! No wonder I've been thinking it's quiet in here...

[Greg Dawes]

While the newly updated forum has some "let me know if someone new post" type features, it's not as straightfoward as the RSS feed. With the old version of the forum, a MOD was required....that holds true with the new version as well.

Therefore, I'm looking to see if we can add an RSS MOD to the new forum. Hopefully that is do-able!

[Kenward]

That would be good.

As much as anything, the RSS feed is a way for me to direct messages to a place where I can see them easily.

At the moment I use a robot (website watcher) to look for changes on the Forum main page. But I don't always have time to get to the robot and things get missed.

I used Google Reader to monitor the X1 RSS feed which made it more visible when something had come up.

In other words, it was a part of my information management.

And, of course, we could use X1 to eat the forum's RSS feed. So I could create a filter and keep up with the forum within X1 itself.

I haven't worked out if I can still do that without RSS.

[tjh]

Fantastic!
RSS Feed has returned today.

Thanks very much!

[Kenward]

Absolutely! I was amazed to fire of Firefox today and to see that X1 shows up in Google Reader. Even the old address still works.

[Greg Dawes]

Yes, we got the RSS Mod re-implemented to work with the new version of the forum software. We still need to add the RSS graphical link...still to come.

In the meantime, the forum RSS feed link is: http://forums.x1.com/rss.php

[tjh]

I've noticed how badly you guys are getting spammed at the moment.
I don't know if you've had much of a look, but there's some decent anti-spam tools out there for phpBB.

http://lithiumstudios.org/forum/viewtop ... f=31&t=941

That's a pretty good one I hear and it integrates with the http://www.stopforumspam.com/ site.

Anyway, just a thought!

Tim

[Kenward]

I've noticed how badly you guys are getting spammed at the moment.

You can say that again. I spent a lot of the weekend catching this stuff.

Clearly the perpetrator is some sort of headcase.

Must have thought that the weekend would leave the place unprotected.

[tjh]

They're just spam bots, fully automated.

I run a couple of Drupal sites and I use the fantastic Mollom service. Every comment posted is checked for spaminess. If it's thought to be spam, the poster is given a captcha. It works great, because most users don't even know it's there (they never see the captcha) and if they do get one, they can fill it out. No spam anymore.

Sadly there isn't a Mollom plugin for phpBB, I know, I checked.

It'll get to the point where a human can't keep up deleting it, or it'll be a fulltime job.

But thanks Kenward if it's you cleaning it up, it's a thankless job!