Hey Everybody!!! Forum Software Upgrade in the Works

Yep. I wanted to post this morning, but ran out of time before I had to leave for work.

I think people who don't see behind the scenes might be surprised at what a great job the mod staff does of making most spam disappear before you ever see it almost all the time, even in the middle of the night. The fact that you see a piece of spam after the software transition doesn't necessarily mean that spammers are getting through because of the new software. It means that nobody from the mod staff has gotten around to deleting and/or moving the post in question ... yet, which happened occasionally (but not often) with the old software, as well.

It is amazing how much spam comes in and "magically" (i.e. through a lot of mod work) gets moved or deleted before it ever becomes intrusive to the rest of us.

Also, there are a lot of safeguards in place in DF now that we learned about the hard way -- things like the prohibition on use of the word re-fresh, like delays between posts and searches etc. These are things that were potential forum-breakers and that are in place now as a safeguard, because of the hard work and vision of the mod/admin staff here.

My $0.02.

Same here! by now all is well with my little DF world...and I got to keep my avatar...Wow...and to think that's what I change on an almost daily basis on my FB account...Thank god I still get to use it!

I'll take that back...I was on page one and hadn't realized there were 5 more! I guess it's going to take a while!!!

Just checking:

refresh

(I understand why there was a technical problem here, but it always seemed to me a soluble one, and I wonder now how the new software does.)

Ah.

Much better.

I assume that this class of problems is also addressed.

http://xkcd.com/327/

It seems everything else same, just seems the quality of avatar photos got blurry, not as high quality as before. Otherwise it is easy to follow.

I assume that's because the image criteria for the avatars have changed...I can't remember what it was previously, but right now it's minimum 200 pixels, and it resizes to fit. If your avatar is 100x100 or 150x150, the software might be stretching it a bit.

In a way, it is similar to facebook, I like there is a "like" button for each posts. That's cool !

Those restrictions were put into place after one day when the mod staff sat and watched, mostly helpless, while a bot logged in and generated so many spam posts and spam-post spawn so fast that it brought DF to a standstill in a matter of minutes.

I assume that, if we're able to use refresh, these days, there's something in place in the software to filter our input and prevent melt-downs. OTOH, I will never forget the afternoon and evening I spent watching that bot taking over the site. Nor will I forget he helplessness I felt.

Is there a way to adjust the frequency of alert/update emails we get? The old forum used to have an option to just get a weekly email summarizing updates to a watched thread. Now I am getting an email for each new post, and I don't see how to adjust that. (It will quickly get overwhelming for threads that are active to get an email with each post, but I want to be able to see when things I'm watching get reactivated, so I don't want to turn it off completely.) Thanks.

Still getting used to the new format, but liking it overall.

I didn't see an option to just the frequency, just an option to turn alerts on or off (Mine are off. An alert for each response seems a bit much.)

I hadn't really paid attention to the blue dot. This is useful. Thanks.

The ability to "sandbox" user-generated content is a pretty fundamental site requirement.

It's also a tricky problem, but one that can be solved. Even for experts however, truly correct solutions can be surprisingly challenging. To wit:
http://googleonlinesecurity.blogspot.com/2012/08/content-hosting-for-modern-web.html

I noticed this too, but I don't mind.

Right, that was my point. I thought perhaps I had missed finding it, but if it isn't there currently I would appreciate more options than just on/off, if possible.

Too funny. I never even knew that the old software had that feature. Oops!

The Tapatalk on my iPod touch does not seem to work with the new forum. It seems to be stuck on the copy of the forum around Sept 13. Any other Tapatalk users? (I DO hope this app can be made to work!)