3 posts tagged “forum”

The Lucire forum has been beset by spammers since its relaunch, and to think that all it takes to defeat the ’bots is an extra question in the registration process. For phpBB users who feel that some of the advanced-Captcha solutions are too hard to implement, putting in an extra question, which must be answered correctly, seems to throw the spambots—for now. It’s apparently remarkably simple to stick in and the commenters at the below link have put in useful corrections.

http://boonedocks.net/mike/archives/143-PHPBB-Anti-spam-Registration-Question.html

   A public thank-you to Mike Boone for a very effective mod!

[Cross-posted] One glitch aside (in the notes below) I think we might be ready for prime-time—this is the public announcement (rather than the private one sent to Voxers earlier). Lucire has a blog—after I resisted it for years. The idea: to write about some behind-the-scenes stuff. I see no reason about having any “mystique” behind what we do. We work—hard.
   Some of you in the marketing world will know that I did not think much of blogs originally. And that led to my refusal to go with a Lucire blog—after all, the forum was pretty successful from 2002 to 2005 before our hard drive conked out in 2006 and a lot of the data disappeared (they’re buried on the server somewhere, I am told by the team).
   But the world has moved on, too, since 2005, and putting the occasional op-ed in blog form doesn’t seem too bad an idea. As long as it contributes to the community and allows us to talk to our readers, why not?
   It’s been repeated in the first post of the new blog, where Lucire ‘Insider’—the name comes from the print edition, though I did toy with ‘Oracle’—is stated to complement the Forum and Facebook group.
   What I am wondering is how long my MySpace opposition will hold out, now that I am eating humble pie on this issue. As mentioned, the idea of a JY&A Media publication appearing on a Murdoch Press site feels funny.

Note to Maureen: we weren’t able to fix that earlier glitch you mentioned as nothing in the coding shows up (especially harder since it can’t be replicated on our computers), though there are some oddities (the Digg.com, Del.icio.us, etc. links only show on some posts, and there is no logical reason for them being “selective”). But who said computer programs were logical?! One entry aside, only a few dozen people are visiting the blog at the moment as we haven’t exactly made it obvious, so maybe with a bigger sample we might be able to track down the error. Please do bear with us!
   If anyone else cannot see parts of the Lucire ‘Insider’ comment form, viz. if the name, email and blog fields disappear, please send me a comment here. Especially if you have theories on why this happens!—JY

In 2002, my colleague Nigel Dunn set up a discussion forum at Lucire, originally called ‘StyleTalk’. This was extremely successful and in the years it was up, it logged up thousands of posts.
   Unfortunately, in 2005 and 2006, this forum was hacked repeatedly—coinciding with the staff difficulties I have alluded to on my blogs over the last nine months or so. Eventually, with other issues becoming more pressing and our attentions elsewhere, we regrettably let the forum die. Its database had been corrupted by hackers so, as far as I know, it could not be salvaged. Perhaps it is for the better.
   Interestingly, we have not had any successful hacking attempts since that change in staff.
   I am happy to say that tonight, we put the forum back, albeit without posts from our lovely regulars such as Lata Tokhi and Joanne de Voe. (If they are reading this, please go there!)
   The forum was also responsible for our discovering Doug Rimington, our regular Wellington photographer, who originally posted there as an enthusiastic amateur teaching himself the trade. I responded to Doug and invited him to a shoot that was to take place the following day.
   The StyleTalk name is being used on another new service we are introducing at Lucire, so the revised forum is called a more boring Lucire Reader Community Forum. But it says what it is and I’m happy with that.
   It’s about 99·5 per cent ready—I have noted some glitches to the people at phpBB, who designed the back end to the forum—but I would love for Voxers to hop on over and see what discussions you can get going. (The glitches do not relate to privacy.) What I am saying is that I trust my Vox neighbourhood here more than any other group to be the folks who cut the ribbons. I’m also happy to hear any feedback you may have, too.
   It’s not the only new service we have there at Lucire—I look forward to letting y’all in on the next one soon.
   As for me, I am off to bed, and hope we don’t wake up to too many bug reports! Have a great day over in the US, and a great afternoon in Europe.