Poynton News - written by local people

It's been a long time since I blogged here. Far too long in fact. Now that we have launched new forums hosted locally rather than in California, it's time for me to break my silence.

The new forums use phpBB, which is the de facto software for forums these days. Those of you who use forums will no doubt be familiar with its look and feel. Unfortunately we weren't able to transfer either registered users or the archive of posts from the old Yuku forums. However this hasn't stopped the forums from making a swift take-off. We now have around 70 registered users and growing, and 15 threads and 78 posts to the new Poynton forum, and that's less than two weeks since the forums were launched. We're keeping the old Yuku forums as a read only archive, so those of you who posted there will still have their contributions available for reference.

From the start, we wanted to allow posts by registered users to appear immediately, not be placed in a "Moderator queue" as was the case with Yuku. (That way we wouldn't get, as one user put it, "3 Tesco threads, 4 Waitrose threads, 3 Morrison's threads...".) We also wanted guests to be able to read the forums but not post to them. This is now working well. However if you thought that setting up new forums and getting them working in the intended manner would be easy, read on...

Many thanks first to the webmaster, Colin Eyre, for setting up phpBB in the first place. For those who don't know, Colin runs a web site design business in Poynton [plug]homepage.uk.com[/plug] and is also responsible for the Poynton, Bramhall and Hazel Grove Web and Scoops Sites. Without Colin's dedication and enthusiasm we wouldn't have the new forums (or the old ones for that matter) at all. I agreed beforehand to assist in administering the new forums, and to help in configuring them. (People may have noticed an oblique "changes are afoot" reference in the old forums. In fact I was "in the know" a couple of months before it happened.)

We had all kinds of problems figuring out how to set up and configure the forums. I even had to call on the services of the phpBB support forum on a couple of occasions. When we thought that we had got it right, we unleashed them on the world. Within days it became obvious we had got something very wrong, as a set of explicit porn images appeared in one of the forums. In too much of a hurry, we deleted the post and the user before finding out who he was and where he was from. However I then decided to audit the registered users, and found a very suspicious one based in the Ukraine. It turned out that he was registered with the same fictitious email address on around 100 different forums. Some of the usernames he used made his pornographic intentions clear. (Yes there are people out there sad enough to spend their lives registering with forums just to post porn.) User promptly zapped. That's when the alarm bells started to ring. Should we have banned the posting of images? But he could still have posted text porn. Not the solution. But how did he manage to register with a fictitious email address in the first place? Oops! number one. We'd overlooked requiring new users to authenticate themselves, so the user must have re-registered after I deleted his previous username. Security hole fixed.

That's all sorted now then, I complacently thought. That's when somebody asked why guests couldn't see any of the forums, but were required to log in. Oops! number 2. Not only had we thought that it would happen by default, but when it didn't, we had no idea how to make it happen. After two hours and more posts to the phpBB support forum, I found a way of fixing it - apparently not the recommended one, but no matter. At least guests can now see the forums and read the posts. All resolved now. Or is it? Only time will tell. At least we have had no further abusive postings. (Yes it does say in the conditions of use that you'll be deleted, banned and possibly executed if you do, and the announcement thread says much the same, but who reads those?) Only time will tell if we are now in a fool's paradise, or whether we really have fixed all the issues.

nedsram