One thing that was bugging me before these forums went off line, and has caused even more hassle since they've come back on line, is the amount of spam posts. These are increasingly now of a somewhat less than appropriate nature. I am regularly clearing out spam memberships that haven't been activated and spam posts from members that have, presumably automatically, activated and posted. It is a pain and likely to put off legitimate people joining in.
I may, it seems, be forced to employ one of that horrible "type these characters in" systems which presents a set of disguised characters to read and type in. This is a pain for several reaosons:
- o They can be difficult for anyone to read at times due to the fact that they have to be impossible for a computer to read
o They can limit accessibility to some, which is neither good or acceptable
o It is one more annoying hurdle to people joining in
One thing I will also do is look around at alternative forum software. phpBB is an extremely popular solution, but 'out of the box' it seems sadly lacking in features necessary to managing users and preventing spam. Does anyone know if the Simple Machines forum software is any better in this respect. It looks good, but I have to say I'm less than happy with the license terms it uses.