How not to do a forum

[MAllie]

I sold a name a little while ago on sedo, and just checked out of interest to see if anything had been done with it. I came up with a forum that doesn't seem to have excited much interest, and thought that for the sake of sentimentality I would support it.

But . . . when I attempted to register I kept being given a desperately hard set of letters to enter (can't recall at the moment what the test is called), all of which failed. I never have any problem with these on other sites, so thought I'd contact the owner to tell him/her. Guess what? No contact details. So if the forum is somewhat lacking in new members, there may be a good reason. A pity to have put so much work into it only to have those attempting to register stumble at the final fence.

[stewie]

Yeah it happens, hopefully they get it worked out... everything takes more work then we think,
how long has it been?

[SpartaN]

Yea, its called Captcha Visual Confirmation. Its to stop Bots from registering accounts and flooding the forums with spam. But even this has been broken, and more advanced Bots have no problem reading those images. So now 'Human Questions' are being introduced.

There should normally be an email address to contact the admin. Just try Admin@domain.com or Info@domain.com.

[myst woman]

captcha settings can close out users fast.

[ftaylor]

And here is how to do a forum : www.getvanilla.com : owns. The code is absolutely glorious. This is growing exponentially, to the extent that they are number 1 on G for "open source forum".

[Carter]

That Vanilla is good but vBulletin is better...

[ftaylor]

Yea, and vBulletin has been around since the beginning of forums just about. vBulletin is elite, but it's expensive. vanilla really looks nice tho, and I think it's only going to get better.

[jdk]

I always suggest for those who do not have the $$ to buy vBulletin, to start with phpBB. Once your forum gets established you can always use impex to import to vBulletin.