The focus for the past several years for board owners has been to prevent (or at least have some easy way to ignore) spammer registrations. When spammers thought it was useful to have an entry on a board memberlist they were often satisfied with getting through the registration process. They didn’t bother to activate their account. As a result, one of the most popular (and fortunately very easy) MODs for discussion boards was to prevent inactive members from showing up on the member list. This is the standard configuration for phpBB3, no MOD required.

Spammers reacted by altering their process so they can activate accounts. (I as well as other board owners have seen a dramatic increase in use of gmail accounts for this, so clearly Google’s registration process has been cracked and automated as well.) Like many board owners, I would like to have a “clean” database. But it wasn’t a huge imposition to get spammer registrations. If they never posted, they were not a contributing member of my board but at least they weren’t getting in the way. I had a MOD that prevented board members from entering a web site until they had a minimum number of posts on my board, so at least I didn’t get a member database sprinkled with unsavory web links. There are also MODs available that prevent zero-post users from showing up, and for pruning inactive or zero-post users after some specific period of time. All of these were okay in their day, but are not as effective anymore.

I’ve posted many times about my Checkbox Challenge code. It has served very well in protecting my blogs, several phpBB boards, and even my comment forms from spammers. However I am starting to see some issues, and that bothers me. Why? Because the new spam seems to be coming from humans rather than bots. I don’t know how we can combat that. Spammers seem to be quite creative with their posting strategies as well. More…

A few weeks ago I had an interesting conversation with a woman from England who is doing a thesis on the psychology of online communities (discussion boards). During the conversation she dropped a phrase that I immediately stopped and wrote down so I could think about it further. Here is the basic question that was invoked by her comment:

What is the difference between recognition and reputation? More…

In the past I have done a number of tricks to celebrate today. One year I posted a very official looking press release stating that the board had been bought out and would no longer be a free resource. Another year I used to tricky CSS to flip the “off topic” forum upside down.

This year I used a suggestion from my wife… it’s evil. I will post what I did after today is over.

How about you? Any fun tricks to share?

I suspect that most folks running phpBB don’t get beyond the 5,000 member mark. Even fewer get beyond the 10,000 member mark, or three years of consistent growth. What happens when you get to that point and can’t afford to run your board anymore? Then it’s entirely possible for a board with over 100,000 members to simply disappear.

It happens.

I have posted a lot about the Adsense program over the past years, specifically related to advertising on phpBB boards. I currently do not use Adsense, but I did for many years. However I never relied on the revenues from that source to keep my board running. If I had, I might have ended up like this case study:

Warning to Webmasters: It can happen to you

The link contains a case study about Soccerpulse, a web site with over 100,000 members that closed up shop because their Adsense revenues declined and they could no longer afford to run the site.

I posted a question on Google’s support forums a few months ago (since they don’t seem to offer email support of any kind anymore). While waiting for a response, I have spent some time reading and at times responding to some of the questions there. One of the questions that I saw posted most frequently can be paraphrased as “How can I make more money” or something along those lines. I realize that many board owners probably aren’t using Adsense, but if you are, I thought I would post a few summary tips on this subject.

You can earn more money by:

• Generating more traffic
• Generating more clicks
• Getting higher-paying advertisements

I’ll talk about each of these at a high-level in this post.

More…

We have a topic on my board with the title “Please do not post in this topic”. Needless to say, this topic has survived for nearly three years, even in the “off topic” area where topics are pruned after 14 days of no activity. So lately I have been trying to have some fun with it.

First I added some javascript to the page (but only for that topic) that made the Reply and Quote buttons move away from the mouse. That made it impossible to click on the button, but you could still tab to the buttons and invoke the required code. Yesterday I switched the normal images for the buttons with the spacer.gif and sized it to zero by zero pixels, essentially making the button invisible. I also altered the tab index to -1 which according to a few sites I read makes the button disappear from the tab sequence.

Of course there are still several ways for folks to post in the topic. That’s sort of the point, to see how long it takes folks to figure out how to work around the challenges I have put in place. For example in the first version someone could disable javascript and the buttons would no longer move, giving them another way to click the button rather than using the tab key.

To continue the fun, I am looking for suggestions for other ways to challenge folks, and keep them from posting in that one topic. The key is there has to be some sort of loophole, as I’m not trying to completely lock folks out.

Any ideas?

phpBB3 includes a “report a post” feature that was often requested in phpBB2 and available as a variety of MODs. I wrote my own that integrates with other MODs that I have implemented. But one of the things that I did different (and that I prefer) is that I provide a visual indication when a post has been reported.

Just a few minutes ago I was on phpbb.com and saw a post in the General Discussion with the title “Is this new home page nice?” Anyone that has been around phpbb.com for a while knows that this sort of post – even in GD – is against the rules. I figured that someone might have reported it already, but there’s no indication that such an action was taken. I decided to go ahead and report the post.

When I clicked the proper icon, here’s the message I got:

This post has already been reported.

Well. If that’s the case, why not tell me? More…

That’s how much this article says that Google has outstanding in unpaid dollars for Adsense.

The Google Float is the amount AdSense publishers have accrued in earnings but have not yet been paid. You know, all those people that haven’t reached the $100 mark that triggers a payment. The figure is currently at $532,547 million. That’s over a half billion dollars. If Google killed AdSense, they would have to pay that all out.

One interesting thing about the AdSense float is that it increased last quarter by 3%. In the 2 previous quarters it decreased. I wonder if this was due to all the AdSense accounts that were disabled recently.

Tell me there’s no incentive to start figuring out ways to avoid paying out those funds.

I myself have seen one strategy… Google simply stopped paying me. That’s not the actual process, but that is the net result. I have more than one post about how the search links from Google had been starting to pay more than Adsense for Content. A couple of months ago (September) Google fixed that: the took 100% of my search earnings (yes, that’s correct, I wrote 100% as in all of it) for a “search costs” adjustment. This fee isn’t new… or rather the ability of Google to apply this fee is not new. It’s covered in several places on their site and in their terms and conditions.

What are the fees mentioned in the Terms and Conditions?
Adjustments

The problem that I have with this is after almost five years of zero adjustments I find it irritating, frustrating, and in fact downright suspicious that Google has decided that my “costs of search” now equal my entire search revenue amount.

For two months in a row.

I sent Google an email. I got a form letter back.

I have removed Google from my sites.

I’ve seen this on other boards but only recently have I started seeing it on my own: people that edit the first post (or potentially even all of their posts) of a topic and remove all of the content. They might leave behind something like “…” because as we all know you can’t have a truly empty post. The net result is the topic is then worthless because nobody knows what we’re talking about.

With phpBB3 the moderator team can lock a post to prevent further editing. But once the original content is gone it doesn’t help. So tonight I started thinking about how and where to store post revisions in order to recover from this sort of action. More…

A few weeks back I wrote about including a new “social widget” from AddThis on one of my boards. Today I removed it. Why? Because a few weeks ago their code started screwing up. Since I was referencing their code rather than hosting my own copy, I inherited their problems.

That’s not something I am really happy about. More…