Jew's software is better.

It's free anyways, you should upgrade. Would you like me to talk to someone about setting it up for you?

Realistically though, it's just about knowing little tricks, like only letting registered people post (although they should still be able to view forums) and having a few questions to answer when they DO register. We have a question on our dead forums that simply asks "are you a spambot" and the top answer is yes and the bottom is no. most bots just pick the top answer, so people that choose "yes" don't get registered.

If your forums aren't capable of this, try making it so that a mod or admin has to review registrations, as opposed to registreation being immediate,and people who pick "yes" can be disapproved. hell, I'm sure even requiring e-mail notification would prevent bots, as most bots don't have the ability to jump into their gmail and click an approval link.

quit being a hermit and hit a negro up on AIM and we'll talk about it.

Syd Lexia wrote:

I'm concerned about changing software as I don't want to lose all the topics and force evertone to register. I do need to upgrade phpBB, but in doing so I will need to completely redo my theme and templates to match improvements made to phpBB. I really need to upgrade Wordpress as well, and I've been slacking for pretty much the same reasons.

I had no idea you used wordpress. I would make it TOP priority to get that upgraded. THI uses wordpress, and apparantly there's a seurity hole in the older wordpress that hackers exploit. we had that trouble already, and it was a huge pain.

and considering this forum frowns upon reviving old topics, and there's only a small handful of active ones right now anyways, I don't think you'd be losing much to change to a new board. make an announcement in the site news and on this forum that you'll be doing it on such and such date, and that everyone will have to reregister if they want to keep posting. this way you can prune all of the accounts that never get used anymore also.

another alternitave would be to actually put your mods to work. I know for a fact that you guys can see everyone's info (password, username, email address). you guys could take all of that info now, and then make new accounts for everyone on the new software. it's a simple matter of a few clicks in the admin CP on an invisionboard.

top that with having to redo everything if you upgrade this board anyways, and I'd say it's about time.

Syd Lexia wrote:

I can't see passwords. I can, however, manually change passwords at will without inputting the old one. One of the reasons that I don't want to just simply start over is because I have a massive list of almost 200 bad e-mail domains in the current forum's banned list that helps to curb spambots. And then I have selfish search engine reasons.

you DO know that they rarely use the same email twice, right?

that would be VERY useful.