[CentOS-devel] Forums

Thu Aug 9 20:50:05 UTC 2012
Les Mikesell <lesmikesell at gmail.com>

On Wed, Aug 8, 2012 at 5:04 PM, Karanbir Singh <mail-lists at karan.org> wrote:
> On 08/08/2012 11:03 PM, Les Mikesell wrote:
>> I'm really the wrong person to do that for a couple of reasons - one
>> is that I dislike forums in general, and the other is that a local
>> (Chicago area) system that I use runs SMF so everything it does would
>> seem as 'natural' as forums can be.    I could bounce questions to the
>> guy who runs it or try some specific tests, though.
>>
>
> Fair enough..
>
> Might he share the top5 most irritating or defective bits of the software ?
>

The only real issue he mentioned on the admin side was dealing with
link spam and he uses these plugins:

stopspammer - http://www.stopforumspam.com/ -
http://custom.simplemachines.org/mods/index.php?mod=1547
mod httpbl - http://www.projecthoneypot.org/ -
http://custom.simplemachines.org/mods/index.php?mod=2155

He says captcha doesn't work because now spammers are mostly paid humans...

He did point out that he doesn't have to deal with scaling problems -
the two sites he runs are pretty low volume.  Something larger might
need caching tools or php accelerators.

On the user side, when you visit a forum, it's 'new' status changes at
the top level even if you don't read all of the new postings (but they
remain marked as new when you go back to that forum).   This may
affect the 'show all new postings results too - or at least there is
some quirk that can make things you haven't read disappear under some
conditions.

And from my use of the system  the RSS feed only gives a few lines of
a posting, not the whole article, so it isn't usable to read through
google reader or other aggregator - but that might be configurable
somewhere.