Wapsi Square Forum

The Wapsi Forum has been upgraded to phpBB 3.2.3, which is the latest one available.

I had to remove all the existing mods, which included the Gravitar mod. I'll try to come up with something to replace it, especially if there are complaints.

If you want additional options on the board, like styles, etc, please go through the phpBB customisation database at

https://www.phpbb.com/customise/db/

and point out exactly which ones you think would be useful. This will save me a ton of time, as all I'll have to do is review the extension and see if it's something that would be useful.

Hopefully we can push and get the forum more active again, now that it's not quite so old

BW

It looks as if a few of the security extensions might be very helpful. "Authorized for URLs" might block a lot of the bot posts, "Stop Forum Spam" might keep some of the bots from registering, and of course there's always Ban Hammer (a.k.a. the Ritual Anvil of Chastisement) if it comes to such drastic measures.

You seem to have Akismet guarding the main Wapsi site... can you use that here as well?

I'm not sure if we can use the same Akismet API key or not. I'm pretty certain that this site won't qualify for a free key. I'll do some checking later.

I haven't seen any 'inactive users' (people that passed the registration but haven't activated via email) since the upgrade, so the captcha may be working. It's a bit annoying, but feel free to let me know if I should make it easier or harder to read.

Like the cleaner design, but was worried for a minute -- found the View New Posts under the Quick Links at top left. Yay! Not sure how to advertise that right away (brief pop over message?) but I hope it gets found by all.

A lot nicer and cleaner, though yes, I had a bit of an orientation issue at the start. I do like the dropdown to get to the various options.

I want my Gravatars back!

Try looking for whatever it would take to enable Gravitars in phpBB 3.2

I just added some more complexity to the CAPTCHA. I don't want to go overboard, because I'd prefer people could actually sign up and participate; however, there were another 10 'inactive' logins and three spam post attempts this morning.

I have the complete newbies set for post approval until they've posted 5 times. It means I'll have to choose a moderator or two soon.

Gravitars should be working again, although they might have to be re-linked or uploaded.

Automatic Daylight Savings Time (DST) would be nice to have back... I had to go and manually change my timezone and edit my post, for it to reflect my actual time...

Other than that, it looks nice. Looks like we now have more formatting options, too...

One imediate change for the better is that the Forum is much more readable on the bar_of_soap Android cell phone's screen. I used to have to do some Zooming and repositioning to get it to work.

TazManiac wrote: ↑Mon Sep 17, 2018 2:53 pm One imediate change for the better is that the Forum is much more readable on the bar_of_soap Android cell phone's screen. I used to have to do some Zooming and repositioning to get it to work.

And the text editor also fits on mobile, too, which is super nice.

Some kind of dark skin wouldn't go amiss...

ShneekeyTheLost wrote: ↑Mon Sep 17, 2018 6:12 pm Some kind of dark skin wouldn't go amiss...

One might look at the semi-official color palette which was posted here, and come up with a number of interesting skins for the web site.

You'd be asking for the Brandi skin, I suppose.

Dave wrote: ↑Mon Sep 17, 2018 6:18 pm

ShneekeyTheLost wrote: ↑Mon Sep 17, 2018 6:12 pm Some kind of dark skin wouldn't go amiss...

One might look at the semi-official color palette which was posted here, and come up with a number of interesting skins for the web site.

You'd be asking for the Brandi skin, I suppose.

That sounds.. Creepy. Silence of the Lambs creepy.

lake_wrangler wrote: ↑Mon Sep 17, 2018 1:55 pm Automatic Daylight Savings Time (DST) would be nice to have back... I had to go and manually change my timezone and edit my post, for it to reflect my actual time...

Other than that, it looks nice. Looks like we now have more formatting options, too...

Well, as that's a mod, I can't really use it. I don't want to spend hours every day maintaining the code, and they abandoned mods in favour of extensions when they went to php3.1

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I've installed reCaptcha from Google, and activated it. We'll see if it cuts down on the spurious registrations.

Something like this perhaps?

Oh, hey, Bookworm... Authorized For URL's looks like it could help keep down the spam, by requiring authorization to post URL's.

I thought about doing the authorization for URL's, but it made more sense to just require authorization for 5 posts. Mildly annoying for me and new people, but considering that the spammers sometimes just try to use their signature for the URL, and jam all sorts of weird stuff in a post, it'll block them the best.

I'll see how the recaptcha is going tomorrow.


As for the pycode skin, I'll wait a few days until the author has a chance to update the code for 3.2.3.

lake_wrangler wrote: ↑Mon Sep 17, 2018 1:55 pm Automatic Daylight Savings Time (DST) would be nice to have back... I had to go and manually change my timezone and edit my post, for it to reflect my actual time...

Other than that, it looks nice. Looks like we now have more formatting options, too...

It looks as though if you've set your time zone correctly, it should automatically stay in step from now on.

Bookworm wrote: ↑Mon Sep 17, 2018 10:27 pm

lake_wrangler wrote: ↑Mon Sep 17, 2018 1:55 pm Automatic Daylight Savings Time (DST) would be nice to have back... I had to go and manually change my timezone and edit my post, for it to reflect my actual time...

Other than that, it looks nice. Looks like we now have more formatting options, too...

It looks as though if you've set your time zone correctly, it should automatically stay in step from now on.

I had it set correctly in the previous board version, but when I checked here, it was set for one timezone over. Now, it is set for the right timezone. We'll see what happens when Daylight Savings Time ends.

The one thing I'd inquired about from the last iteration was just to change the header from the generic "phpBB" logo to something Pablo could sketch. Mostly so you could tell you were on the Wapsi Square forums, and not just "GENERIC DISCUSSION FORUM".