Moved to phpBB

[Bob]

Hello all,

It has been one year since the inauguration of SkirtCafe as the successor of Tom's Cafe, with me as Master Barista. When I took over, we used a one-year license for the vBulletin web forum software. That year has now expired. For a variety of reasons (technical, administrative and political) I am inclined to use the free software phpBB system instead (free as in freedom). So... I have converted the forum to phpBB, which you see here now.

For the most part, I expect things to be similar. There may be some getting used to, especially at first. You will probably have to log in again. If you have problems accessing the board, please do not hesitate to send me a message at bob1 at skirtcafe.org.

I will fix things up over the next few weeks. I will restore the mission statement at the top, the MUG graphic, etc. But for now it should work.

For now, user registration is self-service. I don't expect that to work well due to spamming, but I'm trying it for now, maybe I'll be pleasantly surprised. Please be patient, if we get overly SPAMMed, I'll fix it.

Avatars have all been lost. No, I would rather not restore them. Let's consider this a time for us to upload a new updated avatar.

Comments and complaints (but not flames) can be posted here, of course.

All the best,
-- Bob (Master Barista)

[crfriend]

It has been one year since the inauguration of SkirtCafe as the successor of Tom's Cafe, with me as Master Barista.

Dang! An entire year. My how time flies! Congratulations on your first anniversary!

To be sure, the change was a bit of a jar, but I (for one) respect your judgment in the matter and believe that it'll eventually shake out to be just fine. I was not anticipating having to go through a password-change handshake, but that may make some sense depending on how the things were encrypted in the backing database.

I have one very sincere request, though. Please do not back off on the registration process criteria. I believe most of us here have seen how poorly IMFF is faring at the moment, and I'd really hate seeing that happen here.

Again, please accept my most hearty congratulations on your first anniversary as "Server Boss"! Cheers!

[RichardN]

The new board is fine, and if it's free that's even better. But the formatting needs attention where it goes haywire -- e.g. http://www.skirtcafe.org/forums/viewtop ... 6&start=15 http://www.skirtcafe.org/forums/viewtopic.php?t=9508

It wouldn't accept my password so I had to use the "forgotten password" routine. Otherwise it's great.

RichardN

Edited to add more examples

[AMM]

...
I have one very sincere request, though. Please do not back off on the registration process criteria. I believe most of us here have seen how poorly IMFF is faring at the moment, and I'd really hate seeing that happen here....

The main page mentioned a newly registered user -- "Jokessdasa", so I looked up his info.

No description, but his home page is an on-line pharmacy.

I'll let you draw your own conclusions, but I suspect they will be the same as mine.

I then went to the "memberlist", and looked at the most recent registrants. There were 6 new registrants in the past 2 days, all with websites, and of these websites, 4 were clearly spam ("www.adultsexvirginsvideo.com", for instance), and two were maybes.

I know it's not my place to tell Bob how to run the website, but I think we already have a spammer crisis.

-- AMM

[Stevie D]

I then went to the "memberlist", and looked at the most recent registrants. There were 6 new registrants in the past 2 days, all with websites, and of these websites, 4 were clearly spam ("www.adultsexvirginsvideo.com", for instance), and two were maybes.

I know it's not my place to tell Bob how to run the website, but I think we already have a spammer crisis.
-- AMM

I agree with you AMM - the spammers are here.

[Bob]

I have re-instituted user sign-up controls.

[binx]

They all have suspicious websites.

binx

[ChristopherJ]

I don't know anything about PHB - or whatever it is - so I don't know how it works in regard to the formatting of the forum. I have noticed that quite a few of the old discussions and/or posts have lost almost all formatting - or it has gone very weird anyway.

For example - my signature has gone all weird. I've now disabled it.

Is that a permanent thing? Or is that a temporary thing while the new software settles down?

[Bob]

New threads should not have formatting problems. As for old threads --- I will at some point figure out why theformatting is messed up. Probably phpBB and vBulletin use different conventions for formatting.

[Big and Bashful]

I hope the "posts since last visit" page is going to be rebuilt. It is missed.

[Bob]

Can you tell me more about the "posts since last visit" page please? I was not aware of it.

[Big and Bashful]

It might have been called "New posts". One of the menus near the top of the scree was something like "searches" or "useful links". In it you could get a screen showing all the new posts you hadn't yet seen, it gave an excellent way to keep track of what you hadn't seen. You also saw your own latest posts so that you could keep track of were you had commented. Check out IMFF for something similar. Ah,, IMFF seems to have died for the moment, has the spam killed it? Speaking of which, another spammer has joined this forum.

[crfriend]

The main page mentioned a newly registered user -- "Jokessdasa", so I looked up his info.

No description, but his home page is an on-line pharmacy.

I'll let you draw your own conclusions, but I suspect they will be the same as mine.

This is certainly one place where The Skirt Cafe shines in relation to ones like IMFF (which seems dead at the moment); I'd like to thank Bob for looking after the problem, and anyone who has volunteered to vet membership submissions.

Personally, I'd approach the problem with programmatical tools rather than a "human-in-the-loop", but that's just the way I tend to look at things.

Until people stop buying things advertised by spammers this scourge will continue.

[binx]

The subject titles are often misleading, sometimes posing as a response to a previous post. By opening them they are counted as read, encouraging the spammers to do more.

binx

[Bob]

phpBB has given me a lot of additional ways to keep SPAM under control than vBulletin did. I have a couple of tricks that I believe will eliminate about 100% of the SPAM we're getting now. In the meantime, I have a user vetting system in place that is much more efficient than the previous one. One problem we had before was that it was so hard to vet new users, I procrastinated it, and potential new members would leave the forum out of frustration in getting registered. So I really think phpBB is going to help us out there.