Admin approval is now required for all account registrations

[Alice]

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

[Spectere]

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.

[Alice]

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.

[Spectere]

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*

[Alice]

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...

[Spectere]

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.

[Alice]

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.

the conversion is finally picking up steam again and i can feel this statement in my bones

PHP finally forced my hand with this because the array subscript warnings in PHP 8 make it basically impossible to hack support for it into IP Board. I'm overhauling the phpBB conversion script now. Just getting profiles and groups to convert right was a total nightmare and I haven't even got to fixing the post and private message de-mangling, let alone figuring out how to hack the polls and IP Tracker data in. What a mess!

Also, I found a very cool arbitrary PHP execution exploit in IP Board that was labeled "IPB Firewall" and had been there for 12+ years.