"Thinking of starting a forum" Topic

Hi all

I'm thinking of starting a wargaming forum and would like to hear from people who run them.

Is there much admin work involved?

Any recommendations on forum hosting sites? eg freeforms.org and software? eg php

Cheers
Kieran

My forum has almost no admin work except that I have set new members to admin acceptance.
I found that letting people join without being checked resulted in lots of spammers.

As AB said they biggest problem is spammers. You need they maximum number of security features and a couple of moderators to help you if they do get through.

On they SOTCW forum new members have to solve a CAPTCHA then reply to an email and then have to post on a specific thread within 24 hours or their account is locked. We have 1 admin and 2 moderators who help.

For a small forum, make it manual authorisation.

Any gatekeeper stuff is too be honest utterly pointless.

Captchas – can be broken by software such as Xrumer when it is paired with "death by captcha". Did you know that there are services like death by captcha, where when a piece of software has to crack a captcha, it posts it so a company who have real people getting paid peanuts in Indonesia, who type it in and it gets passed back the the software? Well there are tons of them and using xrumer and a service like that you can create accounts at around 1000 per hour. So forget captcha.

Even question/answer combos can be bypassed by scripts.

Best to make it invitation only rather than making people jump through a ton of hoops by using "maximum number of security features" that dont stop spammers at all – or custom code a forum like Bill has so no software can spam it!

The only thing that might help you is to add some lines to your htaccess file to check referrer, do a search online for some ways to do that.

6sided is a bloghost rather than a forum, but we use wordpress multisite and buddypress – two platforms that get spammed to ****. So we just made it membership request only via a form and our spam is zero.

Jaz
6sided.net

Hm. I have captcha and security questions on my own forum. The only time it really got spammed to asterisks was when it had to be reinstalled, and I had to take a couple of minutes to put the security stuff back up manually.

Or maybe it's so boring the spammers ignore it…

Webhosts: I don't really know, but I'd advise against 1&1 in the UK. When I first set up the forum I had to upgrade to a business account, just so I could put in a MySQL database for it.

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Warren B.
minisculpture.co.uk

We've never bothered with most of the security questions / captcha's etc, and we did get occasional spam to start off with. Since then we turned on manual activation for new accounts, and we've only had one slip through since then.

We still get them trying to register, but I can just reject them with one click. Most of the time their username or email address is obviously duff, but if in doubt, a quick Google search does the trick.

Back to the original question, the amount of admin depends entirely on how busy the site is, and how often you want to run things like backups. We have a webguy who does a weekly auto-backup, and then everything else is monitored by me on a daily basis.

Moderators.

Have a good and enforced no flaming rule.

Set up a small section for off topic stuff to keep the signal-to-noise ratio good.