Forum Bug Reports and Feature Requests

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I don't want to go through the hassle of multiple logins and it would require a bit too many changes to integrate an option to create a moderation post (given there is no mod for it).
The existing mod I've mentioned before doesn't work, so I added a hack myself, which allows to do what I've mentioned. It is now possible to ignore everyone, except admins (Arhu, Jaz, Myrthos) and special moderators (Corwin, Gorath).

As to the font issue, it is odd that Verdana is not enabled, but I'll look into how we can make this better.
 
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Back to the font issue. We are using Verdana, when that is not enabled it defaults to whatever font is the default font. What I can do is use a list of fonts, starting with Verdana and ending with sans-serif as a catch-all when the preceding fonts in the list do not exist.
However Verdana is specifically made for readability and uses more spacing between letters compared to other fonts. It is however a Microsoft font, which is probably why Apple doesn't enable it by default. I've checked a couple of sans-serif fonts, but none of them use a similar spacing as the currently used Verdana font. The list is:
Verdana, Tahoma, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif

Tahoma, Arial, Helvetica and (on my system) sans-serif are all more or less similar, but all have a noticeable difference with the Verdana font.

In 2006, Verdana was probably a good choice, but these days with everybody having higher resolution screens the font is not really a requirement anymore, so perhaps it is time to change to a new font as the default font… somewhere in the future.

Anyway, if someone has a suggestion for a platform independent font that we could use let us know.
 
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Yeah I just enabled Verdana and it works and looks nice. It’s a shame Apple disables it. Not sure what the standard multi platform sans-serif font is currently.
 
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I noticed the "mentioned" never decrements. I was expecting it to disappear after the posts I was mentioned in.
 
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You mean the one at the right hand side of your post?
That is more of a social thing, so everybody can see how often you have been mentioned. For me personally it is not really a worth while feature to have, but it came with the mod.
 
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Its a nice vanity feature. I was just confused by its functionality
--
On another topic I did a forum search and had a sudden urge to sort by views or replies to try to clarify the topic I was looking for.

I that possible to do?
 
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Would be nice if the registration process was a wee bit more something or other to stop these spammers. I presume they are robots but who knows. It seems they create accounts - create a bunch of empty posts - and when they get their post count up ....
 
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We already have a set of anti-spam options in place, none of them are really working. Against them. Anyway, what I did over the weekend is place everyone with a sufficient amount of posts in a new user group that provides the same functionality as the existing. Everyone below that post count stays in the registered group. Currently I have set that to 5.
Someone is automatically promoted to the new user group when reaching 5 posts.
Next steps are:
- enable post moderation on people making posts who are in the default registered user group
- disable showing threads that are under moderation on the front page
- check how to involve more people in moderation
Probably will do that in a reversed order :)

For the record, we have about 5300 registered individuals with 4 or less posts.
 
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The problem I think is that bots can make many users and make many posts that require moderation. Perhaps it would be more efficient (on moderators) if new users had to be approved. the form for becoming a new user could require some questions that they have to type the answers to see if it is a 'human'. The concern is that a legit person who wants to be a new user might be turned off if the process to become a user is too difficult (esp if it is a developer who wants to respond to a thread); while bots can create a very high load on moderators.
 
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In theory that is true. However it it is not that the load has been so high, it is just a couple of posts a day that cause trouble, something ranging between 0 and 10, most of the time. They are however visible longer than they should due to the lack in amount of moderators, or in the wrong time zones.
 
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The problem I think is that bots can make many users and make many posts that require moderation. Perhaps it would be more efficient (on moderators) if new users had to be approved. the form for becoming a new user could require some questions that they have to type the answers to see if it is a 'human'. The concern is that a legit person who wants to be a new user might be turned off if the process to become a user is too difficult (esp if it is a developer who wants to respond to a thread); while bots can create a very high load on moderators.

It's not too bad if there are "many eyes" on the approval process. Unless the load of spam registrations becomes ridiculous, it's a bit like having an email inbox that attracts a bit too much spam - you have to go through it to pick out the legit messages, and if several people are helping, it's a reasonably manageable chore.

It's always a bit of a game of cat and mouse, and I'm sure the team will also be using other tricks to trap the obvious spam, to make the task a bit easier.

One trick that might be worthwhile (if not used already), is "honeypotting" the registration form. Essentially, you add common but unnecessary fields to the form, and use CSS or javascript to hide them from the human viewer. Then, the bots will read them, and will likely fill them, and then you kill those submissions.
 
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At the moment the only way to accomplish moderation of user posts, is by making someone super moderator, which is a bit much perhaps to just hand out like that.
I did however change the user group of new registered users to have their first 5 posts moderated. This means that these posts and threads need to be moderated by admins and super moderators and everybody in the new user group I've made for this: "Registered Users Moderators" (who are basically also super moderators at the moment).
 
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rpgwatch.com=spam?

Today I was sending a mail to a friend. The mail was rejected, allegedly due to being marked as spam. The offending part was "rpgwatch.com" in the text. By removing that, everything was on the green.

Another (related?) issue: Quite often, when I visit rpgwatch from my phone, I get a warning, saying that the certificate can't be verified, and therefore I should return to safety. (which I don't). Doesn't happen when using my real computers, but I've had the same problem on several phones, and using different browsers.

?????

pibbur who is confused

PS. No, Joxer, getting rid of the phone is not an option. (I don't use it for games , except Sudoku) DS.
 
That would imply the browser doesn’t update it’s security cache with the new certificate that was installed last month.
What browser are you using?

As far as blocking rpgwatch.com is concerned, it is because of what happened last year when the security of our server was breached allowing someaddress@rpgwatch.com to be the sender. It caused rpgwatch.com to be blacklisted. I notice that mails sent to you by RPGWatch bounce as well.
I’ve tried to contact a lot of ISP’s to be taken of the blacklist, but for some ISPs it is very complicated or simply impossibke to accomplish. I don’t know anymore if I contacted your ISP or not to be honest.
 
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It looks like we can no longer comment on news stories. Is this the direction going forward?
 
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No, it should still be working.

Update: I see, something has changed on the front page

Update 2: Fixed. Thanks for mentioning it.
 
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Double postings are showing up.

When I post: the screen becomes white. When I go back a page, I see reply has been posted. Twice.
 
Yep, something similar going on here, except I get the warning about trying to post the same message twice.

EDIT: Actually, didn't happen when I posted this, but was consistent yesterday.
 
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Have tried twice to post today and none of my posts were shown (on the Iratus Kickstarter news).

Edit: now its showing (did not see it before posting this)!
 
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