Suggestions

Hi All.. This is a new function for LightBringers !! Please post any suggestions here.

I would like to suggest that we create a space for people to share their creative works or info about their creative efforts e.g., short stories, poems, screenplays, paintings, music, books, etc. and conversations related to collaboration to co-create.

Hi Bill.. Please check out the new "Creative Works" forum !!

Thank you, Chuck!

I guess I would be interested to know that you are able to prevent spammers from posting nonsense. Typically the best final barrier I have found is to make the very first post subject to admin approval, so I guess when I post this I will see if it does. But later I might delete this question, although most of these spammers are using bots which cant read posts anyway

hugs
Geoff

Aah I see problems looming. I might add at one point of the old DLSF forum in one day I had over 20 bots signing up, and that was when no approval was needed (to sign up), only a valid email address which received the confirmation email from the site. I had to switch to manual approval for several months until we dropped out of the sites they were targeting. But I have for probably over 15 years had a system where the first post of a new user must be moderated. That always catches a spammer. Well maybe 1/100 who is actually a smart human and not a bot will post a meaningless first post. But they never quite manage to match the tone of the site, especially as most of them have insufficient English.

I occurred to me as this forum is not running on the LightBringers site, but is a sub-domain of the creators of this forum technology, I guess they could code to block known spammers. For your help on this, here is a site I have used for - well forever - to identify known spammers, and thus I use it to check the email address of every new signup on the DLSF forum. and 90% are spammers.

LOL. I cant post external links for 7 days. That's one spammer control. But easily circumvented by just waiting??

So if you really want it, look up the domain "stop"+"forum"+"spam"+"dot"+"com"

Geoff

Thank you for your input, Geoff! Chuck, what are your thoughts?

Bill Here. By the way, I entered that last reply under admin, so I'm not sure if you saw it, Chuck.

Hi Geoff!

I have just requested that the forum send me an email whenever anyone registers. That email allows me to verify the registrant. I'm not sure how much work this will be, but it looks like it has the potential to prevent spammers from getting into the forum. :-)

On a side note, we have a lot of interest from people who want more information to help them prepare for the changes we have been told about. More specifically, people have recently mentioned that they are interested in information to help them prepare for the kind of electrical grid failure Jesus mentioned and they also are concerned about preserving the Celestial messages that have been received through Divine Love mediums over the decades for future generations as well. I've started the Members-Only "Preparing for the Future" forum to be a place where forum members can access the information.

Thank you for all you do to share the truth of Divine Love with the world!

Hi Bill,

I expect all electronically stored material to be lost, possibly for ever, but maybe not. The power source we will ultimately get will be local, so there will be no grids. That does not mean we won't have an internet, but I kinda doubt it. Things have to change big time.

On my end I will download a local copy of my site and the SoulTruth site. These will run locally on a computer, without internet, if I have power. This will allow anyone who visits me in my home to read the site. obviously off-site links wont be working, but a huge amount of files are stored in my site. I would be happy for anyone who wants to to make a local copy. It's not hard. There are several programs and last time I used Sitesucker.

hugs
Geoff

Thank you for your thoughts, Geoff!

I agree that power in the future will be locally sourced. I'm very hopeful that we will receive the guidance we need to preserve all of the stored electronic information needed to support God's Plan.

Bill

By the way I had occasion to access this site from my phone. I know it has advertising, but using a browser that seems less intrusive, but with my phone the adds were so big - relatively speaking - I soon gave up. They absolutely made the site impossible to traverse. Try it and see if my experience is typical or not.

Geoff

Hi Geoff.. Many thanks for reviewing this new forum and for your suggestions. Re bot and all the problems forums are prey to: I agree. I am not sure how much this free version protects us, but one of the things that caused me to use it, was that it is free, and it has an export capability in case we grow and need to change. Re the mobile site, I added a better header pic today (the normal LightBringers icon), and hopefully this will help. We have 2 things going for us now, we are still a bit under the radar, and Bill is doing a good job riding herd on all the postings (Thanks Bill !!). But lets all keep an eye on and caucus if we see a problem. Again, thanks for helping us get started !!

Chuck

Thank you both, Chuck and Geoff!! When we get our financial and fundraising mechanisms established, I'm planning to request that we put funds toward one of the paid versions that doesn't have ads. Is my understanding about ads being removed from the paid versions, correct, Chuck?

I have used phpbb for over 20 years, but I probably would not recommend it anymore. It seems to need incessant upgrades, and changes such that although its supposed to be easy, in practice if you have made any mods to the site, it's not. As also the support forum is now so bogged in different versions, and very slow to get out support for new versions.

The beauty was that it was free, and no adds because you ran it on your server, as shareware. It also has a lot of functionality, but probably quite hard for a newbie admin to actually utilise.

Both Jeanne and Al simply could not regularly log in however. I never found out why, other than they could not remember their passwords, and never seemed to understand how to reset the password. But people seem to like the FB way, which is rather adept at holding your log in details, and no one ever logs out. Of course you don't have to log out of that forum either, so I never understood the issue, but eventually without user support, it became a backwater. I hope you manage to avoid that, but the take up here has been quite slow, I think. FB is simply not useful for serious discussions because it's a "feed" and disappears quickly.

But the very best spam catcher is what we have used for years. Ensure the first post is moderated, and do not allow any other posts to be public, until that first post is moderated. 99 times out of 100, the first post is a give away. For a short period of time these guys tried posting inane meaningless posts to fool us, like "Great post, like to see more" but we soon were awake to that. On Al and Jeanne's DLSF forum it shows 478 members but over 80% are blocked spammers. Because that site does not allow two users to use the same email address, I never delete a spammer's account. Buy the way, as I am now allowed to post links here, this is the site that is pure gold, it will tell you with about 98% certainty that someone is a spammer if they have even one listing:

https://www.stopforumspam.com/

Geoff

Thanks for your suggestions Geoff..

• Adds:   Yes Bill, I think the adds go away when we move to a paid "package": https://help.forumotion.com/t155623-disabling-ads-on-your-forum
  
  
• Spam:  It looks like Forumotion has some spam suggestions: https://help.forumotion.com/t159901-new-add-a-unique-and-personalized-question-to-block-spam  .  What do you think of this approach Geoff ?
  

Chuck

Hi Chuck

Yes a question is a good idea. I assume that if the only spamming that is occurring is via a contact form that they must have some quite successful approaches to the issue of spammers simply signing up? But all I saw was the delay of a period of time after your fist post. So I guess time will tell. But right now we could do with a few more members. And more posts.

Geoff