TB

Hosting an interactive platform of any kind is becoming increasingly difficult. I'm not sure if this is a happy accident that works in the favour of large corps or some kind of planned consolidation. Between age verification, the possible repeal of Section 230, GDPR, a growing list of expected features, and constantly shifting privacy laws, it becomes harder to defend having forums. On the tech side, I'm not sure which is worse; the hyper-commercialization of CMS vendors or the increasingly complex attacks that necessitate using something with commercial support. Invision Power (the platform this site is built on) is moving towards version 5, which required a total site rewrite. I'm not excited to stay with them as (in my opinion) they have become pushy with their cloud hosted solution, and it feels like they're trying to shove away the smaller customers that built them. I've also rarely had great success with their support. I'm not saying they're "terrible" or "enshittified", please do not bother them, but it's obviously no longer the right platform for this site. For what it's worth, I've finished converting the site to Xenforo. I figured if I had to rewrite the site anyways, it was the perfect opportunity to move to something more future-proof. Xenforo has evolved into a solid platform. This doesn't mean we plan to keep the forums, but we wanted a platform that could support forums should they be needed again in the future. That being said, we're still discussing the future of the forums. On the topic of spam, it would be great if IPB had an Akismet integration option. If we were going to stick with this platform, I would find a way to shoehorn that in. I did implement hCaptcha and set it to the highest difficulty which is stopping 300-500 account creation attempts per day.

A few are going through the trouble of manually creating accounts or farming out the new captcha, but I'm seeing several hundred or more failures on the new captcha a day now. Would be great if IPB had an Akismet integration. I'm looking at other options as well.

Yeah just knocked them out again, I just switched the forums to hCAPTCHA for captcha and set it to the highest difficulty. It's a few grades above reCAPTCHA so I hope that helps. I'm evaluating options, just keep reporting them in the meantime so I get a notice. This won't stop existing accounts. Some of the spambots create multiple accounts months in advance.

It would be great if there was an integration for Akismet. It was a few bots mass-posting this time around.

Apologies, they found a way around the auto-mod. I just cleaned up around 200 reports.

@Mira the website and its back-end are all using the latest updates from the vendor. We try to patch as soon as a security update is available. We moved to a new server OS when the last one depreciated. The IPB updates are part of the reason for the visual and functional glitches. Each time they push a security update it's also bundled with a boat-load of template and functionality changes that aren't backwards compatible. We've asked for a separate security channel, but that's not happening. It is simply a matter of resources and time. For what its worth I focus what time I have on the security side. This is a volunteer effort without the backing of corporate money. If you know any trusted full-stack developers looking to do pro-bono work, I'm always happy to talk to them. No snark intended, we could use a front-end dev.

Apologies, things have been very busy on the other side of the house. I've implemented a new way of displaying the donation history which can now be found by clicking the corresponding link on the donations page. @Im_CIA "Roast assured — I’ll support you!"

You may have noticed some outages today, we were working on updating the back-end of the site. Assuming nothing goes wrong, that should be the end of updates for a while. We're still working on fixing some of the remaining bugs (EG: the quote button) when we have time.

Should be fixed now.

Looks like the cronjob isn't firing off. I'll add it to the list. The donation page still shows the current up-to-date information but it looks like the historical post isn't getting updated.

Unfortunately not, the data pre-transfer has been long deleted.

Forums are a fantastic way to archive information. Conversations that are long dead can be read anytime. I'm not a huge fan of instant chat communities myself, for a number of reasons I won't get into. The forums are a small community and that's okay. Big communities have problems we don't (and server maintenance costs that we don't). This small community takes a several member task force and a decent chunk of change to run as it is. We're not actively trying to keep the community small, but it has its perks. We don't talk about the enlightenment van.

Gottem.

We've been hearing that, we're still looking for a solution and we're up for suggestions. I can't make an exception for RSS feeds because that opens the site to an attack. I've disabled attack-mode but it still seems to have this behavior.

Not that I know of, I need to look into it this weekend.