Preparing a new home

[Reno]

Hey all,

I\'m sure you\'ve noticed the sudden surge in spammers.

Unfortunately, the forum software we\'re currently on is so distressingly old, there\'s really not all that much that can be done to deal with them. The default spam-resistant options are in place, and they don\'t do anything. Honestly, I think they\'re probably using an exploit to post directly somehow, as if you look, none of those obvious spam users are even activated.

I\'ve mentioned before I\'ve been looking at setting up a new forum, however the issue is, as mentioned, this forums\' version is stupifyingly old(I think it\'s actual RC1 of mybb. ....yeah.)
With that, there\'s no easy way to move to a new forum and retain ANY of the current content. Threads, posts, usernames, etc.

Part of what\'s kept me from moving on with it is trying to think of a way to deal with that.
I could deal with threads and posts being lost if required, but I feel that losing the user accounts and logins would be a much harder blow.

However, given the boon in spam, I think a solution needs to be moved on soon, regardless.

So, what I\'ll be working on is prepping the new forum, and once it\'s ready, I\'ll have the current forum URL direct to that, while keeping this one live on oldforums.ttrgame.com or something of the like.

That way, anyone needing to recover their account for the new forum can log in on these old boards and PM me via their existing account with what they want the new board info to be. I\'ll set the user up for them so they\'ll be good to go.

I feel this is a good middleground. I\'ll see about doing some kind of query script to recreate the bulk of the user data, but the passwords would be in no way portable as the way they are handled is completely different now, hence the PM-me solution.

So yes, this week I\'ll be putting in time to get those boards underway and get as much content moved over as I can. At which point, I\'ll do the URL swap(with a helpful sticky directing to the old ones as needed) and we can start moving into our new home.

From there, I can provide additional news about work-things that have been happening recently, and where we\'re going from here.

-Reno out