vBulletin v IPB – The Final Chapter

Posted on by AWS3 Comments on vBulletin v IPB – The Final Chapter

As some of you know I bought a site database. The site vBnt.net was a vbulletin site and is no longer online. I was going to convert it to IPB. Problem was it wouldn’t convert. I have done my share of vbulletin to IPB conversions, over 20 in fact, for myself and clients and this is the first time I could not work through the conversion issues so I just upgraded to the latest stable release of vbulletin, version 4.1.1.

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Might Use vBulletin For One of My New Sites

Posted on by AWS3 Comments on Might Use vBulletin For One of My New Sites

I am getting ready to open a new site. It’s been one I have been wanting to open for a while and is in a niche that is rather new. There are some established sites in the niche so the sledding will not be easy, but, since this is a somewhat newer niche there is a good chance of being successful. For this site I will use IPB. I still think IPB is the best forum software to date.

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Forum Admin Communities

Posted on by AWS12 Comments on Forum Admin Communities

I recently resigned my admin position from a popular admin community that will remain nameless in this post. The reason for that will be clear in the end. Since that time many things have been bothering me about these communities with the exception of one. They refuse to join in any sort of alliance with each other that could and more than likely would benefit them all. Instead each has there own variation of the rule that you can not link to other admin forums.

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Combating vBulletin Forum Post and PM Spam

Posted on by AWS16 Comments on Combating vBulletin Forum Post and PM Spam

One of the most frustrating jobs for any vBulletin forum admin or moderator is the never ending fight to stop post and PM spam. There are spambots that specifically target vBulletin forums. vBulletin has helped by adding Akismet spam protection, captcha protection, simple question and answer or reCaptcha to help combat post spam. This was effective until the vBulletin captcha was cracked. The Q&A, in my testing also doesn’t seem, to be effective. These are the measure I’ve taken to help combat the fight against spam.

To stop the post spam I use reCaptcha.  It seems to be the most effective against spambots, but, for the low life spammers that still do things manually even reCaptcha doesn’t help. The main purpose of these spammers is to get backlinks to their sites and services. What I did was create a new usergroup called Registered Members. The new group has the same privileges as the default Registered Users group.

Read on to see how to set up the registered users group and the new registered members group permissions to help combat vBulletin forum spam.

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