[Lasher]

Welcome to our new forums. Just in case you missed the email or link on the home page, some of the key differences are listed at www.topmudsites.com/newforums.shtml

For some reason I received the "Announcement" email twice. If you did too, I apologize for the extra spam.

This forum has been in development for a long time, but I'm sure there will still be lots of cosmetic details and tweaks that are needed. Please bear with me as they are worked through.

If you report issues please post whether you are using the 'TMS - Dark' or the 'TMS - Light' style.

Rather than post a huge list of everything that is different now, I will post them gradually to increase the chances of being read. Please encourage your players to take part in the discussions here too - it is good exposure for your MUD and if we can get a sense of real activity going around text based MUDs we might just pull in some new players, which benefits ALL muds.

[Brody]

I'm a big fan of the dark style. Looks great, Lasher!

[Lasher]

Thanks, I do prefer the dark style too, but when if I'm outside and it's bright it can be a little hard to read.

Thankfully it's easy to switch between the two.

[Ide]

ditto what Brody said, thanks for the upgrade Lasher.

[Belerik]

I'm quite the lurker, but I've been a fan of vBulletin for quite some time. Good choice of software. You might consider a dark gray alternate post background. Would stir things up a little and keep them from becoming monotonous with the vast black theme.

[KaVir]

I'm generally not fond of change, once I've gotten used to a particular forum, but in this case I very much like the new colours and style. A vast improvement over the old "cartoony" forums, IMO. The extra goodies look good too.

[Aeran]

I think the new forum rocks! It is a big improvement.

[Lasher]

Thanks! Hopefully we can get a little more activity going now - the entire thread history was put into a sitemap and submitted to Google so over time that should help too. Google works on their own schedule and they haven't crawled the pages yet but if you've taken a look at the 'who is online' detail page from the link at the bottom of the forum home you can see that Yahoo is all over it already.

[Rathik]

The dark theme feels like it's about a decade old. Fortunately I like the light theme. It's a nice change.

[scandum]

The new forum is definitely an improvement, good work

[Aeran]

Originally Posted by Rathik The dark theme feels like it's about a decade old. Fortunately I like the light theme. It's a nice change.

Have you tried the full WYSIWYG editor that can be turned on in the options? It is really nice .

[Brody]

I just tried the WYSIWYG editor for the first time. VERY cool stuff.

[Lasher]

I thought that during the conversion I'd defaulted all accounts to WSIWYG editor, guess not. I wonder if it's worth going back and doing it now or if that is just going to annoy people who already got used to the standard editor.

In the meantime, it's amazing how quickly the spammers find you. This forum hasn't really been indexed yet, hasn't been submitted to any forum directories, etc but I've banned about 50 spammer sites already. We're a fairly low volume forum so I just have it set to email me every post, but still surprised by how quickly they find a small VB forum online 5 days.

[scandum]

Originally Posted by Lasher In the meantime, it's amazing how quickly the spammers find you. This forum hasn't really been indexed yet, hasn't been submitted to any forum directories, etc but I've banned about 50 spammer sites already. We're a fairly low volume forum so I just have it set to email me every post, but still surprised by how quickly they find a small VB forum online 5 days.

We actually use a nifty little application to advertise the various wonderful products of our clients on forums. Once a profile has been created for a specific web page it's easy to add new users with a www link and also leave a little message on the forum itself if desired.

So instead of dealing with 50 little spammers you're probably dealing with one or two bulk mailers, which I've always found to be a much nicer name for those working in this dynamic and interactive internet branch.

If there's an unusual pattern in the creation of these accounts it's fairly easy to put a halt to it. On my own forum I block every sign-up that adds a www address upon creation, it's fairly effective. Another option is deleting the www field and making their email address public, this to give the lesser bulk mailers some email addresses to toy with.

[the_logos]

I don't use vBulletin so I'm not sure what configuration options are available but I've found that for small forums (ie those not worth spammers sending humans to beat the CAPTCHAs) it's pretty easy to keep spammers away if you can set up, in registration, a question/answer of some sort that is easy for a human to parse but not for a spambot.

For instance, on http://forums.eartheternal.com one of the registration questions is something like, "Please enter the current month and year in a format like 05-2007." Invision (the forum software we use) doesn't allow for specific question/answers but it does allow us to require that answers are in a particular format (in this case, XX-XXXX). We've had zero problems with spambots since I instituted this method.

It only works, of course, as long as a forum is small enough that it's not worth it for spammers to incorporate the 'answer' to that 'question' into their software or send a human to sign up for the account, but it's easy enough to change the question regularly too.

--matt