Site + Forum

[imported_Ryan]

Argh, just did a big update of the site. But it seems the new photos gallery page wont load ” title=”Sad” />
Plus the link to this forum is wrong ” title=”Sad” /> Hopefully I’ll have these things fixed soon. Although I’m not sure what the problem with the Gallery is.

Ryan,

Edit: forum bug is now fixed.

[Kyle]

Looks good Ryan. Very professional.

I think that competitions page should be split. Would be useful to be able to have addresses such as http://www.dunedinicehockey.hellyer.kiwi/dihl/ and http://www.dunedinicehockey.hellyer.kiwi/agrade/. Those pages could head whole sections, rather than being part of a bigger page.

[imported_Ryan]

Hmm, I was intentionally trying to avoid that as I was finding that people weren’t rifling through all the different pages and just read a couple before stopping. I thought maybe putting them all on the same page would be a little easier as you can just scroll down and read them all sequentially.

I’ll be adding a sub-menu to the photos gallery soon because of the image loading issues it’s having so I might transfer that design over to the competitions page so that you can atleast skip to the section you want.

The other reason for keeping them all on the same page is that it’s less for me to maintain which is nice. I’ll think about it though and might change it later on.

Oh yeah, a lot of them are quite brief too and don’t really deserve their own page as such. But I guess I could just combine a bunch of them and stick them on a page labelled “other competitions”.

Ryan,

PS: just found another bug too, the forum is sposed to open in a new window, not in the current one. I’ll fix that tomorrow probably.

[imported_Ryan]

Most of the bugs are fixed now.

The photos gallery is now split up into seperate pages with a simple sub-menu at the top of each page.

The competitions page is pretty much the same, but I’ve added a sub-menu to the top to help with navigation. I may or may not split that page up, depends if I get round to it. It’s easier dealing with single pages, particularly at this stage as I haven’t completely sorted the coding of the site yet and don’t want to have to modify a gazillion pages.

[Janey]

Yup thats right Im here to blab about how ABOSOLUTLY AWESOME firday nights game is going to be!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! ” title=”Smiley” /> YUS but…..tear 😥 its gonna be my last game for like 7weeks!!!! ARRGHH!!! I’ll prolly have intense withdrawal symptoms and have to come back for theraputic skating.
YAY for playing the Candian Moose its gonna be FANTASTIC!!! ” title=”Cheesy” />

[imported_Ryan]

Well you’ll be back in time for the DIHL atleast.

Good luck for the game tonight ” title=”Smiley” /> Playing the Moose is fun, I played against them in Gore a few years ago. We had like a thousand people cheering us on (most of Gore!), and the kids kept asking us for our autographs and cards – the Moose handed out baseball style cards with their mugshots on.

[imported_Ryan]

Team photos from the Aardwolfs visit now posted on the website:
http://www.dunedinicehockey.hellyer.kiwi/compe … #aardwolfs

Thanks to Clive Murphie for the pics ” title=”Smiley” />

Ryan,

[imported_Ryan]

We seem to be having some spam issues on the forum at the moment.
I’ve fixed the main problem which was spam bots signing up and posting links to dodgy sites.
But now we seem to have spam bots signing up with usernames just so that they can have their website links in the members list! I haven’t removed the links yet, I’ve left them for people to see what I’m talking about. But whatever you do DON’T CLICK ON THE LINKS, who knows what’s in them.

The offending users are:
Haderup8
Moter
Poencebas

If you see any further examples popping up then please let me know so I can delete the users.

Ryan,

[Kyle]

the avatar uploading works now, which is good.

If someone’s going to that much trouble, they’re doing it manually. Who they are – someone associated with ice hockey, or just some twerp with time on their hands I don’t know.

I wonder if you can push registration through an email address – so they get a confirmation email which they require for registering. Or have the registrations pend until you agree to them. It’s not like they’re flooding in, or are ever going to do so.

Or if it logs ip addresses. Then you could cause some trouble with their isp.

[imported_Ryan]

A quick Google search showed that other people have had this trouble with PHPBB forums and they were certain it was caused by Spam bots not people.

http://boonedocks.net/mike/archives/49- … -Spam.html

[quote:15p5u5a2]I removed the URL field completely from the signup form, and any bot that tries to submit it will fail. This might have stopped some of the bots, but there are still fake users being created. Their profiles list no websites, but you can still tell they are bogus when they list their interest as “pills” on a sailing website!”[/quote:15p5u5a2]

I’ll look into it more though. They did suggest ways around it, but it involved messing with the PHPBB code which could get messy, I’d rather not crash the forum just coz I screwed up the coding so will leave this for the mean time.

And yes I can force people to wait for authorisation before being allowed to post on the forum, but I think some people might just not bother registering if they have to wait for a day before I confirm them. So I won’t be doing that unless it becomes absolutely necessary. At some stage I may add one of those fuzzy piccies you need to recognise to register, but I’m not sure how to do it – yet.

Ryan,

[Kyle]

really? I guess that’s the side-effect of using a ‘out of the box’ coded system – it’s become worth someone’s while to code stuff to attack it specifically.

Anyway, sounds like you’re on top of it. Personally I’d never look at the memberlist unless you’d mentioned it, so it’s pretty minimal. but I guess it would get to be a problem if there were thousands of members and only 30 of them were real people.

[imported_Ryan]

My main concern is that the sites are probably virus/spyware ridden.
Ryan,

[Jason]

As far as i know you’re more or less stuck with Spam members, you’ll need to either put up with them and just delete them as members, or else implement a system to block them signing up which will most likely involve messing with the php code. (as you’ve already said)

You mentioned the fuzzy image verification in order to register, I think you mean CAPTCHA, and from what i’ve heard it’s not too tough to implement, but you will still need to mess with your php code, but I would assume you won’t stand too much chance of losing posts etc, because you probably only edit the register script & perhaps one or two other files, but your main forum content won’t be touched as you won’t edit those files.

You might want to check out [url:3vyz6y9b]http://www.matthewleverton.com/howto/phpBB2-captcha.html[/url:3vyz6y9b]
he talks about adding custom captcha images to the forum. Although I think he uses PHPBB2 which already has it’s own captcha implemented, but looking at his code i think you might be able to use it with any version.

Also heard there’s forum mods that can stop spam members, not really sure where you’d find them though.

Jason

P.S. Not sure if you’ve done it yet or not but you might consider blocking guest posts in the actual forum as sooner or later you’ll get guests posting spam messages. And you always know who’s posting too.

[imported_Ryan]

Yep, CAPTCHA was what I was talking about and yep, guest posting is turned off.
Thanks for the tips ” title=”Smiley” />

Which Jason are you?

Ryan,

[dunedinicehockey]

The users have now been deleted. I couldn’t figure how to track down their IP address though. Since they haven’t posted anything it doesn’t seem to have been stored anywhere (that I can find). I have permanently banned their email addresses though so they can’t re-register under the same one again.

[Author]

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