Neverside

vBloat was actually very liked among the TF community.

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Should give phpbb3 a try, it looks pretty damn nice.

I can't hate on phpBB. It's scripting and db setup seem solid. My only beef is the default template layout with six thousand tables. That make it feel so wonky for me.

One area where bbPress wins big.

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Jon Culver Chia Pets

Oooh another spammer. In the old days, that post would have been deleted by now and rabotayy would = banned. But good old Neverside is a good old pile of garbage without a good old dumpster to put it in. Even the staff tied up their garbage bags years ago and went on bagging other piles of garbage.

Take a look at http://www.audoptic.com - IT WORKS
Those incompetent morons have apparently made the same mistake twice. They must have butts for brains, because Audoptic is going on two or three years now and is actually behind Neverside in progress, though not by much. But then again they've gone three years with nothing to show for it, Neverside is up to four or five with nothing to show for it, save for a dead community.

Last edited by Heri, May 15th, 2008 06:14 AM (Edited 2 times)

Heri - spam on the forum is up to epic proportions now (I haven't counted, but it looks like 20+ bots make accounts and add a spam post per day). NS has no means of protection against this. I do the best I can and delete any spam I come across (I've already deleted perhaps 10-20 spam posts from this thread alone in the past weeks).

Anyhow, if anyone would like to help me with something... Jeremie didn't complete the NS conversion script I hired him to make, so I'm giving it a shot myself before giving up and paying more (I'm pretty close to getting it, but there's some tricky spots I don't get).

So my question. I've been trying to get the user options/preferences out of the NS database and into a format I can import into Drupal (most importantly I am trying to extract user contact preferences so that I will be able to honor member's preference not to be contacted by admins and/or other members). However it's been stored in the NS database in a way that I don't understand. I have near-advanced experience working with Drupal now, though I am still not much of a programmer, so this is over my head. If anyone is willing to help me, please PM me or respond here.

Here is the relevant code... this is stored all together in NS's user table in the int(10) field "flags", which ends up with a numeric value in the field such as 639 or 743, or a huge number of other combinations based on the 9 available options.

PHP:

<?php

$flags = $user['flags'] &= ~(USER_ADMIN_EMAIL | USER_USER_EMAIL | USER_ENABLE_PM | USER_PM_EMAIL | USER_PM_POPUP | USER_SHOW_SIGNATURES | USER_SHOW_AVATARS | USER_SHOW_IMAGES | USER_USE_CENSOR);
    $flags |= isset($_POST['admin_email']) ? USER_ADMIN_EMAIL : 0;
    $flags |= isset($_POST['user_email']) ? USER_USER_EMAIL : 0;
    $flags |= isset($_POST['enable_pm']) ? USER_ENABLE_PM : 0;
    $flags |= isset($_POST['pm_email']) ? USER_PM_EMAIL : 0;
    $flags |= isset($_POST['pm_popup']) ? USER_PM_POPUP : 0;
    $flags |= isset($_POST['show_signatures']) ? USER_SHOW_SIGNATURES : 0;
    $flags |= isset($_POST['show_avatars']) ? USER_SHOW_AVATARS : 0;
    $flags |= isset($_POST['show_images']) ? USER_SHOW_IMAGES : 0;
    $flags |= isset($_POST['enable_censor']) ? USER_USE_CENSOR : 0;

?>

This is an example of one of the form fields on the Options page which sets these values:

Code:

<input id="adminEmail" type="checkbox" name="admin_email" 
value="1"<?php echo $flags & USER_ADMIN_EMAIL ? ' checked="checked"' : '';?> class="checkbox" />
<label for="adminEmail"> Receive Email from Administrators</label>

If someone could help me understand how to query in SQL for instance, all users who's preference for "Receive Email from Administrators" is set to yes (given the above mentioned "combined" value that stores that info), that would be very helpful. I'll be using that info to respect people's preferences when I send an email to invite past members to the new site.

I'm not sure the best way, but I'd also like to somehow "translate" the Receive Email from Other Members preference into a value that my import into Drupal will be able to understand.

Drupal ultimately stores this kind of user preference data serialized in the user table in a field called "data":

Code:

a:11:{s:7:"contact";i:1;s:16:"privatemsg_allow";i:1;s:28:"privatemsg_setmessage_notify";
i:1;s:20:"privatemsg_mailalert";s:1:"0";s:10:"user_title";s:0:"";s:14:"picture_delete";
i:0;s:14:"picture_upload";s:0:"";s:17:"comments_per_page";s:2:"10";s:10:"current_id";s:1:"1";
s:12:"current_date";s:10:"1209857949";s:7:"display";s:1:"0";}

e.g. "contact";i:1 ... means member to member email form is enabled.

Anyhow, if anyone is willing to help, please let me know.

..... Forgot to mention: due to some great progress this year with development of Drupal's forum, I'm no longer planning on using vBulletin or any 3rd party software. vB integration just never came through in the end anyhow (besides the vbDrupal fork, which I don't care for). It was a regrettable waste of time holding out for vB integration that worked, but oh well. Here's an example of a current Drupal forum (recently switched from vB): http://www.webmaster-forums.net

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-- Dave
Neverside Admin

absolutecross.com

Last edited by AbsoluteCross, May 17th, 2008 10:48 AM (Edited 2 times)

Geeze the spam is bad - just deleted about 7 more in this thread since last night. I think I'm going to try a quick tie-in of a CAPTCHA script on the NS sign up form... if it doesn't work, I may disable registration for now (not like real users are registering at this point anyhow).

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-- Dave
Neverside Admin

absolutecross.com

I don't know anything about coding, but I have recently tried outsourcing some code work. If you're patient, and maybe even recreate the project a couple of times, you should be able to find a quality coder, with a good reputation, and for quite cheap.

Check out the following and if you're up for it, post a project and state your budget.

Elance.com - Not as busy as the two below, but a quality site.
Getacoder.com - Lots of coders and freelancers from over seas. You'll get tons of bids on your first day of your project listing.
Scriptlance.com - Not quite as busy as Getacoder, but almost.

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It's said EE-SAW-MOO


I'll speak slowly if your on something, and faster if your not.

Thanks Isamu - I'll investigate those sites and consider it Funds are a bit tight for me at the moment (though I saved some by switching servers, the ad revenue on sites this year has gone down a lot it seems, so it hasn't given me as much dev budget as I had expected. I'm also giving money to my parents since they're out of work right now and need help with the bills... I'm doing a lot more IT department work to make ends meet, though that saps a lot of time). I've been doing some exciting music projects lately (time consuming of course haha), working on scoring music for some short films for Tim Russ (played Tuvok in Star Trek Voyager)... testing the waters in whether I want to pursue film scoring as a full time career.

Thanks for the tip - talk to ya soon bro

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-- Dave
Neverside Admin

absolutecross.com

That's sweet dude! Tuvok was rad.

Well it's worth testing to see how much it may cost you. That's what I did with a project I'm working on.

I wanted a flash game made and wasn't sure how much it would cost. I wrote up every little thing I would need for this game and posted the project on those sites. I got tons of bids anywhere from $500 to $3500 dollars. Obviously I wanted to find someone with good reviews and good english that could do the job for $500.

I hadn't found anyone, so I canceled all the projects, and recreated them. Now I knew it was possible to find users who would do the job for 500, so this time, when I posted my project I let everyone know I wanted to pay around $500. It got tons of new exposure for being a 'New Project' and I was able to find someone to do the job in the price range. We're just going over everything now.

Anyways, good luck with everything man. Talk to ya soon.

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It's said EE-SAW-MOO


I'll speak slowly if your on something, and faster if your not.

Got a CAPTCHA working successfully on the NS registration form. Tested it and it seems to work (it's not the fanciest of captcha scripts, and it gets in the way of NS's own form error messages if the form is improperly filled out, but it will suffice for the moment). Hopefully that should stop all the new spam bots from registering now, and hopefully they're too dumb to log back into the old accounts they created to keep spamming with those (usually the bots seem to log in, add 1-2 new threads or posts, then never log in again with that account).

Jon (sparky) is helping me with the above mentioned question about user preferences in the database.

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-- Dave
Neverside Admin

absolutecross.com