Minor change - URLs on forum postings

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the289admin
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Minor change - URLs on forum postings

Post by the289admin »

Hi all,

I recently limited the number of URLs in forum postings to try to prevent spammers from writing posts full of URLs. I set it to 4 to discourage this, which (I think) reduced the problem quite a bit, but has not resolved it entirely.

I have changed the max number of URLs back to 10 now. The plan is to upgrade the forum software to PhpBB 3.2 over the next few weeks which gives extra features to prevent spammers getting accounts. However I need to test the upgrade to ensure that it does not break the Wiki, which uses the same username/password database for authentication.

As a side note: thanks to those of you who flag up these kinds of spam for our moderators to remove - we appreciate your contribution. If you don't know how to do this, look for a little exclamation mark at the top right of the problem forum post - clicking this allows it to be reported to a moderator and it will be removed, with the spammer's email address added to the 'ban' list.

Kind regards

the289admin
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clive
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Re: Minor change - URLs on forum postings

Post by clive »

Thanks for the ongoing work, but could you please explain what you mean. When you say URLs, are they attached photos? So when you say 4 URLs does that mean only four photos can be attached on one post?

Apologies for my ignorance.
Cheers, Clive.

(If I'm not here I'm in my workshop or on the golf course!)
the289admin
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Re: Minor change - URLs on forum postings

Post by the289admin »

Hi - I did think I probably should've explained that term - sorry.

Yes, when you embed a Photobucket or Flickr photo, it is a link to the photobucket site. We call that a 'Uniform Resource Locator' or URL. Basically a web address.

Another type of URL is the one you see at the top of the browser - e.g. http://www.the289register.com

So in summary, you can have up to 10 embedded photos and/or web addresses in a single post. More than that, then just create a second post by doing a reply to your first one. We had been finding that spammers were creating posts with long lists of web addresses in them - hence the restriction to 10, which I hope will be temporary.

Hope that helps.

the289admin
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