John Smith
Staff member
Welcome back, the site has changed a bit. We've moved to the Xenforo platform which has allowed us to do some much needed upkeep. Please let me know if you find any bugs.
You may find that a lot of the old links don't work. I'm working on a solution but whether it happens depends on what I need to do to make them work.
Spam was a major issue with the previous site, and we're hoping the improvements we've implemented will alleviate it. Especially with AI spam becoming more common. We've implemented:
Akismet Antispam - Automated message scanning to defeat spammers who "cook" accounts to get around filters.
hCaptcha - Set to the highest difficulty.
Stop Forum Spam - Account reputation check on sign-up and reputation tracking.
There are also some other in-house settings/tools to handle spam, as well.
- QA -
Q: Why did you change platforms? Why rewrite the site?
A: We have been running on Invision Community for a long time, but over the last couple of years it stopped being a good fit for Accursed Farms. The costs kept climbing, focus shifted toward their hosted offering, and updates kept breaking our custom theme. Then they started asking us to prepare for the 5.0 launch. Because we heavily use custom modules, it was going to mean rewriting the site. At that point it made more sense to switch than to rebuild on a platform I was already unhappy with. I picked Xenforo which has allowed us to do some things we've been wanting to do for a while.
Q: I thought the forums were going away, why did you bring the forums back?
A: We received a lot of requests to keep the forums. So we did.
Q: Will they go away in the future?
A: Maybe. This depends on a lot of things. Does Section 230 get repealed? Will we be mandated to collect PII for age verification or integrate a third party (we won't)? Are people actually using the forums?
Q: Where is the private message function?
A: Gone. Given the current political environment around hosting an interactive platform and the plethora of options available for chatting, we've opted to remove private messaging. This disincentivizes sharing PII on Accursed Farms and keeps everything public, where we can moderate it.
Q: Where is the "Serious Topics" sub-forum?
A: Gone. Accursed Farms isn't the place for a lot of the topics that come up in that sub-forum. The number of moderation complaints outweighed the advantage of having it.
Q: Why are registrations closed?
A: Registrations are temporarily closed as we stress test the new site.
Update:
1. Search is now working. It doesn't search the whole site, but since the addons generate a topic in the forums and cross-link to each-other, a search of the forum is effectively a search of the site.
2. Speaking of back-links, I got most of them working. The conversion is now done so the forum topic should link to the correct post/video/game and vice versa.
3. There should be a "Mark all as read". If you click "New Posts" at the top right, there should be a button to mark everything read on that page. Let me know if it doesn't show up, it may need a perm adjustment.
You may find that a lot of the old links don't work. I'm working on a solution but whether it happens depends on what I need to do to make them work.
Spam was a major issue with the previous site, and we're hoping the improvements we've implemented will alleviate it. Especially with AI spam becoming more common. We've implemented:
Akismet Antispam - Automated message scanning to defeat spammers who "cook" accounts to get around filters.
hCaptcha - Set to the highest difficulty.
Stop Forum Spam - Account reputation check on sign-up and reputation tracking.
There are also some other in-house settings/tools to handle spam, as well.
- QA -
Q: Why did you change platforms? Why rewrite the site?
A: We have been running on Invision Community for a long time, but over the last couple of years it stopped being a good fit for Accursed Farms. The costs kept climbing, focus shifted toward their hosted offering, and updates kept breaking our custom theme. Then they started asking us to prepare for the 5.0 launch. Because we heavily use custom modules, it was going to mean rewriting the site. At that point it made more sense to switch than to rebuild on a platform I was already unhappy with. I picked Xenforo which has allowed us to do some things we've been wanting to do for a while.
Q: I thought the forums were going away, why did you bring the forums back?
A: We received a lot of requests to keep the forums. So we did.
Q: Will they go away in the future?
A: Maybe. This depends on a lot of things. Does Section 230 get repealed? Will we be mandated to collect PII for age verification or integrate a third party (we won't)? Are people actually using the forums?
Q: Where is the private message function?
A: Gone. Given the current political environment around hosting an interactive platform and the plethora of options available for chatting, we've opted to remove private messaging. This disincentivizes sharing PII on Accursed Farms and keeps everything public, where we can moderate it.
Q: Where is the "Serious Topics" sub-forum?
A: Gone. Accursed Farms isn't the place for a lot of the topics that come up in that sub-forum. The number of moderation complaints outweighed the advantage of having it.
Update:
1. Search is now working. It doesn't search the whole site, but since the addons generate a topic in the forums and cross-link to each-other, a search of the forum is effectively a search of the site.
2. Speaking of back-links, I got most of them working. The conversion is now done so the forum topic should link to the correct post/video/game and vice versa.
3. There should be a "Mark all as read". If you click "New Posts" at the top right, there should be a button to mark everything read on that page. Let me know if it doesn't show up, it may need a perm adjustment.
Last edited:
