spectere.net
Site-Related => News => Topic started by: Spectere on January 07, 2019, 10:05:08 AM
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I honestly never thought the spam situation would get bad enough for things to come to this, but I've had it with this bullshit.
It doesn't help that SMF's development is pretty much glacial at this point, to say nothing for the plugin ecosystem, so trying to combat this by tweaking the settings or installing an addon has been pretty much futile. The methods that I used to use no longer install cleanly into 2.0.15 and I was pretty much over manually installing mods all the way back in the arch0wl.com days, so this is about the best "compromise" I could come up with.
All in all, I suspect it's going to be way easier to mass-delete inactive accounts every few days than deal with "hot fortnite xxx cock pussy creampie viagra" threads popping up daily, so that's the route I've decided to take. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
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Turns out these spammers also will occasionally register accounts and then keep them on the DL for a few weeks before posting with them. I dealt with that in a heavy-handed way by doing a comprehensive member list purge (i.e. anyone with zero posts whom I don't recognize). For the first time in quite a while the member count here is actually accurate!
Also, it's kind of surprising to me how many accounts were waiting in the e-mail approval filter (4200 over the span of two years!). I went ahead and purged that.
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Well considering what this site actually is, I'd say it's not a big deal. If someone from years ago shows up, either they have an existing account or they make a new one. If they make a new one, and actually care about posting I'm sure they will find a way to get it activated.
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Yeah, that's what I figured. Considering the last legit-looking registration was from late 2017, I'm not too worried. I'll check it periodically, but I don't think it's going to require much in the way of maintenance.
I've also strongly considered jumping ship to another forum given SMF's frighteningly slow development pace. The last bugfix release of SMF 2.0 came out in November 2017. That's a long time for a PHP application to go without security fixes, and I constantly worry about having to deal with more than a few spam bots. I do have Apache running under its own user so I'm not too worried about someone rm -rf'ing my server, but you don't need root to make legit servers do some nasty things.
What's worse is that they aren't even keeping pace with PHP. I dare not ask how much many times the string "8192: Function create_function() is deprecated" appears in my SMF database. That was deprecated in PHP 7.2 (which was released over a year ago) and Simple Machines seems to have no plans to fix the issue. Sigh.
Upgrading to SMF 2.1 is also not a viable option, since the latest packaged beta was released even before 2.0.15 (June 2017). Sure, development is active on GitHub, but I'm not going to go through that song and dance.
So I dunno. Maybe I'll flip back to phpBB. I never thought I'd say this but that seems like a far better option at this point. They're actively releasing builds and third-party support for it has always been strong. I remember testing phpBB 3 when it was still fairly new and it was pretty solid (far better than the mess that was phpBB 2...woof), and I can't imagine it would have gotten worse over time.
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I... I don't even know what to say to that. I'm not comfortable with the idea that phpBB might actually be better than SMF now.
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phpBB 3 was a major overhaul over phpBB 2. Even back when it came out (June 2006, according to Wikipedia) it was a solid product. The reason I didn't use it for any sites is simply because I was already running SMF. I ended up demoing it pretty extensively around that time. If I remember correctly, I was contemplating whether to switch back to phpBB 3 due to the stronger third-party ecosystem or upgrade to the next major release of SMF. Obviously I chose the latter.
I think the main problem with SMF is that it lost momentum. When they were cranking out new releases and bug fixes with relative regularity it was great, but now I'm concerned that the next PHP version is going to break the site entirely. I'll bet a large part of that is simply due to Reddit more or less replacing community forums. phpBB was likely popular enough to ride the wave while the smaller open source forums ended up losing too many resources. I dunno.
Oh well. It was a good run, if nothing else. I might do a test conversion on my dev server at home to see if things convert over somewhat gracefully.
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W H O A
(https://i.imgur.com/J83i75l.png) (https://i.imgur.com/J83i75l.png)
Edit: It's worth noting that the screenshot was taken after the first conversion step (SMF 2.0.15 -> phpBB 3.0.14). The theme in phpBB 3.2.5 is a bit cleaner and has some of the other missing features, such as showing the most recently updated topic along the right of the index page.
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Oh my god, it still looks like phpbb after all these years lmao.
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YEPPPPPP. I love it, haha. SMF definitely looks cleaner, but it can always be reskinned.
But yeah, the conversion was successful, and phpBB's media extension is like the YouTube one I installed on steroids. Custom BBcode is also a thing, so admins can create basic BBcode thingies without fiddling with mods.
I'm pretty much going to give SMF a long as it takes me to make a phpBB skin. If they haven't gotten any closer to a proper release or bugfix patch I'm going to make the switch. The PHP team has been making a ton of breaking changes to shed off their old ridiculously naïve and insecure features and based on the log spam I'm seeing, Simple Machines either doesn't have the resources or the motivation to ensure that SMF isn't using calls that have been deprecated for over a year.
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The custom BBcode feature is pretty neat. But yeah, as much as I like SMF, if they can't keep with the times, that's kinda a problem.
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Yeah, agreed.
Another consideration for me is that phpBB3's admin control panel is downright sane compared to what SMF's became. While some things are still easier to accomplish in SMF (the permissions system is still handled much better), day to day activities are straight up buried in SMF's admin page. For the most part, the ACP in phpBB3 is more logically laid out.
Another feature that phpBB3 has that I wish other forums featured is the ability to preview permissions. When I was setting up SMF's permissions I had to create test accounts so that I could see what users could see. In phpBB3, I can go to your profile and click "[ Test out user's permissions ]". After doing that, I see the forum almost the exact same way you would. Oh, how I wish I had that feature all those years ago. <_<
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phpBB is what I've been pushing as a replacement for our hilariously broken and outdated copy of IP Board at DMZX. Glad to know I'm not alone in my skepticism about SMF's future...
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Yeah...it's a little alarming when they don't even seem to be willing to push patches to make it compatible with even somewhat recent versions of PHP.
The theming system appears to be a bit safer in phpBB as well. It uses an actual template engine so you don't end up with a ton of loose PHP in your theme files. I don't know about IPB, but in my experience SMF themes are messier than WordPress themes are despite technically doing less.
The one unfortunate part about phpBB, at least for me, is that the only converter that converts SMF 2.0 forums was designed for phpBB 3.0 and is not compatible with 3.2. I have to do a two stage conversion, which includes installing an old enough version of PHP for 3.0 to even run. Awk. It's not horribly difficult and I have done a very successful test conversion already, but it's certainly not going to be the most straight-forward process in the world.
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Fun (and kind of sad) statistic: in one year this forum received over 12,000 registrations from spam bots.
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Fuckin' ridiculous eh.
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NECROMANCing this but we ended up having to do the same thing for DMZX. It doesn't get anywhere near that many spam bot registrations, probably more like in the hundreds per year, but still bad enough.
Also, DMZX is still on IP Board because getting the rest of the software dejanked (the archive) or adequately updated (Mediawiki) required a several stage alternating PHP update/fix or update everything cycle. The archive is now PHP 7.4 based and Mediawiki is up to the latest version (and IP Board is sufficiently hacked up to work with the newer PHP), but to get IP Board updated at all will either require hand rolling conversion scripts or using a quite old IP Board to phpBB converter and then stepping up phpBB versions until I get to one that actually supports PHP 7.
but to bring things back around to the topic, one of the things in IP Board that broke? spambot reporting, so flagging the dozens of pending registered accounts as spammers would take like 10 seconds per account for the report to time out >:(
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10 seconds per account? What the fuck.
The numbers are kind of variable here (seems like it's been down lately?) but I'm going to guess that SMF's registration process is easier to spoof for whatever reason. At least mass-flagging accounts is fast and simple, though. Pretty much just tick a bunch of boxes, tell it what you want to do to the account, and it flies through it. And hey, maybe when SMF 2.1 comes out in ~2063 it'll have better spam mitigation so that won't have to happen as much.
Re: integration issues. This is why I thank my lucky stars that all of my experiments with various portals and other forms of integration way back when didn't really go anywhere. DMZX is a bit of a special case in that it needs that integration, but in my case it would have only complicated my life with pretty much no gain whatsoever, lol.
Even so, it kinda feels like you can easily convert to SMF, but going to anything else is a bit of a process. Like, switching over to phpBB would require me to convert to phpBB 3.0 (which needs to be done on a box running PHP 5.x :-\) and then stepping up from there. I did it once on a test VM and it wasn't pretty. One of the downsides of PHP gittin' gud, I guess.
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10 seconds per account, yes. It would block on an attempted request to report each spambot to Invision's spam service individually until the request timed out...
Fixing the "integration" wasn't so bad because there's a newer IP Board/Mediawiki plugin I was able to update to. It supports everything MZXGiant's plugin did except forum account SSO, and the wiki is used so infrequently that's not a big deal. When the forum gets moved off of IP Board I'll need to write new integration code for the archive and find a new Mediawiki plugin, but that isn't a big deal. Thanks to the phpBB 3 (I think) requirement on the IP Board converter I will pretty much need to do the entire process on the test server with PHP 5 enabled (or a local VM). Honestly, I might just roll my own conversion code so I don't have to, since the old converter had some major issues anyway (e.g. no multi question poll, IP tracker support).
All of this is still preferable to having to tolerate PHP 5.x.
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Ah. As if those spambot services do much good anyway, especially when they're made for commercial forum software that experienced its peak popularity in the mid-00s (and when they're, y'know, no longer in service). I had one enabled on here for a while (can't remember which one) and it was decent enough...when it worked. Problem is that it would go down seemingly at random and cause the whole site to just return HTTP 500s until it came back up. :/
And hey yeah, sounds like the IP Board converter has the same issues that the SMF->phpBB one does as well. Kinda sounds like the SMF converter might be a little more complete, though, since I think it covers all of SMF's core features (at least the ones that this forum uses). Honestly still not sure if it's worth going through the trouble. I guess it depends on SMF's security at this point. They're still patching it, albeit slowly, and supposedly SMF 2.1 is still under development. At least it's not bound to PHP 5.x anymore. *shrug*
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Dizz tested the old IPB3 to phpBB conversion script a while back and quite a bit of it did convert properly. IP Tracker is an extension so it wouldn't be converted. I think multi-question polls aren't a thing in SMF or phpBB without extensions (if at all) and that's why those didn't convert either. If I can get an extension to keep the multi-question polls that would be great but I'd have to write the conversion code myself probably... and otherwise the old polls would need to be copied to the post body, which also would require manual conversion. Agh. I get periodically pestered about not having made any progress on the phpBB conversion like their work on it was almost complete and not the bare minimum...
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I can confirm that multi-question polls definitely aren't a thing in SMF, and I'm almost positive that phpBB lacks built-in support for them as well.
And, yeah, I don't know why they'd want to rush the conversion. Converting a long-running forum with a ton of history is super stressful since there's no way to visually inspect everything before shoving it all out the door. The nigh-inevitable breakage of intra-forum links is bad enough, let alone the fact that trying to fix conversion issues after the new site goes live can lead to some pretty significant headaches.