A new upgrade has been pushed to the 3 wikis that this server is hosting. Upgrading mediawiki compared with phpBB is a pleasure. Upgrading Mediawiki is as simple as copying over the new version and upgrading the database. All your customizations and plugins will stay untouched inside the extensions directory. phpBB does not have hooks, or any other way to add plugins to it, you need to edit the core application to add your customizations, this causes that each time that a new upgrade is released, you need to edit all the whole thing and apply the upgrade by hand if you don't want to lose your customizations.
There is still a lot of stuff that I need to do. I need to change the catcha code from the forum, the one currently used is broken and I'm very annoyed by the daily automated SPAM registrations that the Alcugs forum is getting.
So, the ToDo list for things that I want to see implemented in the Alcugs forum is:
* Update the forum Captcha.
* Force users with less than 5-10 posts to enter the Captcha verification code.
* Hide signatures and the homepage link off users with less than 5-10 posts, mainly because this is what is being abused. Legitimate users will have always more than 5-10 quality posts, and then as a reward them will be able to display their homepage and signature as soon as they get to the minimal post count.
* Dissallow the avility to send PM's to other users if your post count is less than 5-10, but still allow to send them to administrators/moderators. A typical abuse is a bot that creates an account, and starts to send SPAM to all the other users.
* Add a "report as spam" button to the private messages page. It is still posible that a spammer may do 5-10 quality posts and then start to spam users, so as soon as a user reports this abuse, the spammer will be banned.
Your Thoughts