Forum Bug Reports and Feature Requests

Originally Posted by Myrthos
It is bookmarkable. You can add any bookmark manually via your browser bookmark manager.

Which is something novices are not likely to understand.

I get that and probably agree with it, but it is also a feature that hasn’t seen much support yet from others

Sometimes the bots are rather humorous. I also sometimes can't tell when its a bot or a strange forum post by a user

We got haked again? gateway timeout for couple of hours now.

Our ELEX forum is open and can be found as a sub-forum in the Piranha Bytes forum, where also all the other PB games are located

Originally Posted by lostforever
We got haked again? gateway timeout for couple of hours now.

Yeah, something like that.

There really seems to be a deluge of spam bots of late. Is it time for a captcha system? If only for registration.

If those annoying bots are mostly new accounts, it would be easy to do what many other forums do, and any threads they start would have to be pre-approved before they appear in the forums. You could do this say, for the first 10 threads that the new poster attempts to start, and then after they pass that, their starting threads privileges could be like any other members.

That would get rid of most of the crap. Only the most determined ones would start a bunch of legit threads before they got their crack at polluting the forum.

I think it is time for a first post moderation queue. If possible, I'd add a group of trusted volunteers with permission just to help reject/accept those first posts, to speed up response time, and take pressure off the main moderators.

We actually have such a system, but it doesn't always seem to work as it should.

Originally Posted by Corwin
We actually have such a system, but it doesn't always seem to work as it should.

So, do first posts already require approval from a moderator? If so, in what way is that not working?

Originally Posted by Ripper
So, do first posts already require approval from a moderator? If so, in what way is that not working?

The first few posts of new users are scanned for keywords or strings (defined by us) which get a value. If the values add up to go over a certain threshold (defined by us) posts are put in the moderation queue or even refused outright. This was used mostly to reduce link spam. If spammers just write one line of gibberish however, obviously this method doesn't work. Or we have to make the keyword weighting much more broad-spectrum …

Originally Posted by Arhu
The first few posts of new users are scanned for keywords or strings (defined by us) which get a value. If the values add up to go over a certain threshold (defined by us) posts are put in the moderation queue or even refused outright. This was used mostly to reduce link spam. If spammers just write one line of gibberish however, obviously this method doesn't work. Or we have to make the keyword weighting much more broad-spectrum …

I see. But you'd need a pretty smart filter to catch these random posts without links or typical sales blurb. Given the fairly low signup rate, I think moderating all first posts might be the way to go. The amount of spam threads clogging up the forum is becoming a bit of a drag, and probably wastes a lot more time reporting and deleting after the fact.

This request has come up before but… can we have the ability to add moderators to our ignore list please.

The current setting that would allow that, allows to ignore both moderators and admins. The problem I have with that I don't want you to ignore admins, nor some of the moderators, let's call those 'super moderators' for now. These are the people that intervene with a post when the discussion gets too heated and try to steer things before the discussion goes too far. I don't want anyone to be able to ignore those posts.
There is no option to fine-tune this ignore feature to only ignore moderators, while not being able to ignore super moderators and admins, which is what I would find the only acceptable solution.
I could find a mod, that is already 6 years old that might make something like this possible, but I don't know if that still works in the current version, so I would need to check this.

I think the problem is that you need a way for a moderator to make a 'moderator' post as oppose to a normal post. Then you could ignore the normal post but not the 'moderator' post. While it might be a hassle to have to use something or other to declare a post as a 'moderator' post I would presume those are not very frequent.

In priciple it's a good idea. The rule of least privilege means you should never log into a system with permissions you don't need at that moment. The way traditional forums are designed, though, this would probably be a pain for the mods.

(Super)moderators and administrators could take a second name, I guess, and the privileges could be assigned to those names, after which their old, familiar name could be stripped off those same privileges.

When they want/need to moderate or change the site, they’d need to log off and log in with that second name.
It is surely not as convenient, and they are all volunteers…

Or even an easier solution, remove some people as moderators?

Not sure if this is a bug, but the site default font reverted to a serifed Times font on my new MacBook Pro, despite all the browser settings being the same as my old machine. I really dislike serifed fonts for browsing. They are so hard on my eyes.

It turns out that some of the fonts on my new machine were disabled, including Verdana. So I was getting Times substituted.

Perhaps it's time to pick a new non-serifed font that new mac machines readily support out of the box (i.e. are not disabled)?

Cheers!