Pierce WROTE:
"ok well if i get the chance' i will attempt to rip this entire site to my harddrive, then i can set up a torrent for everyone to grab it if they want. Then someone can start a new site for us with better protection and stronger mod options.
Uhh, so does this mean you're going to go through 4703 threads manually, saving the pages as you go, or what? If we were going to set up a new site, the best way to do it would be to work on integrating a new site into this one, rather than ditching it all and going to a new domain (which will make all our stickers redundant!).
The closest example to this that I can think of is what the AtomicMPC forums did about a year ago - they had their own <a href="
http://archive.atomicmpc.com.au/forums.asp">
custom-written forum</a> (written in ASP rather than PHP, so it was even worse
) and went to an IPB based forum instead. Some may say that it opens up the site to attacks in a greater way, simply because for any vulnerabilities that come out, people are much more likely to target the sites that use the more popular forum software packages.
However, the kind of bots we're having problems with on here are the kinds that you see spamming up blog post comments and the like - looking for any forms that they can spam on websites to put their links across on.
mik WROTE:
"opening a new site, will fix the problems indeed, but i don't think that this will be the best option.
Agreed.
If we were to move to a new system, we would want it to integrate into the existing site, closing off this one and leaving it as a static archive for people to browse through in the future if need-be. The new one created would then start from scratch. I think that this current system is worth fighting for, and until it gets nuked entirely, we should stick with it and if Cisco can help improve it to reduce bots, then it would be even better.
Personally at this point I'm more concerned that this current forum isn't being backed up - we'd really be stuffed then and if memory serves, the database has already died in one way or another in the past, so one would hope that measures were taken to ensure it wouldn't happen again, but that's likely something that only Cisco knows.
Also
Pierce, I'm not sure how long you've been on here (as you may have been on under another account for all I know) but personally I quite like the current system and while it's not got the features of some of the forums that most of us would be used to, it's grown on me and it's unique to the site - Cisco has put a lot of effort in to writing it from the ground-up and I'm sure he'd like to stay with it for as long as possible.
Edit: Well if you're concerned about the images, going <a href=
http://micra.com.au/images/community/forums/>
here</a> will be a start - I've probably pulled hundreds just from going through there picking out ones I like but feel free to grab all of them
---dens