What to do about spam? Should we switch forum software?

Yes, it has been bad spam.  Hopefully we will be able to better control it here.


Nathan

The spam problem has been getting worse lately, and I’ve been unable to tide it.  I have recaptcha, akismet and requiring an email activiation configured, but there is still a ton.  I think the biggest issue is that the current forum software (SMF 1.1.x) does not support per-message moderation, which makes akismet not able to hide spam messages as well and/or not allow requiring admin moderation of forum posts for the first 3 or so.  SMF 2.0 which is currently at RC4 does support better spam management including post moderation which should solve our issues, but I would like to wait until they get to 2.0.

Otherwise, are there suggestions for other forum software?  It would need to be something free.  Google groups has been put forward, I haven’t used it much but at first glance it seems fairly un-featured with a poor UI, but maybe it is enough.  Anyone have an opinion on waiting for SMF 2.0 vs google groups vs somethign else?

Nathan

I would vote for Google Groups, largely because it’s hosted and spam would be their problem, not Nathan’s.  The UI doesn’t bother me.

Best,
Laird

I’d vote for Google Groups too. Most other software communities I interact with are on Google groups and spam or usability is hardly a problem there.

Regards,
Shantanu

I would be happy if we switched to Google Groups.
Thank you for asking…

Has anyone tried importing an existing forum’s posts into a new google group?

Nathan

jQuery found spam to be one the main reasons to move off google groups onto different software (see http://jquery14.com/day-07/new-jquery-forum and http://ejohn.org/blog/google-groups-is-dead/)

Is that a bad sign for google groups being a solution to the spam problem?

Nathan

Zoho (which jquery switched to) says they provide free OSS forums. http://www.zoho.com/discussions/opensource.html  Anyone have experience with them?

Nathan

I remember jQuery’s story of leaving Google Groups, which was when spam at GG was at peak. These days I see it’s much controlled though. Migration might be bit of work in the case of both Zoho and GG as neither of them seems to support SMF.

Google Groups:
http://www.google.com/support/a/bin/topic.py?topic=25904 (mailing lists and Postini)

Zoho:
http://www.zoho.com/discussions/opensource.html (phpBB and Google Groups)

Regards,
Shantanu

I personally preferred the mailing lists over the forums but as the general consensus seems to be to use a forum I would place my vote with GG as well.

The reason I switched to a forum from the sourceforge mailing lists was because a forum seemed more condusive to history of questions being kept and searched.  There are options that make mailing lists searchable, but they’ve generally seemed more of an add-on than something people would really use.

What do you like about mailing lists?

Nathan

I liked the lists because I was alerted to all threads that came in and had the information immediately at my fingertips whether I was currently working from a stationary or mobile device.  With the forum I have to login to view posts and honestly the extra steps of navigating to the forum from the email notification and logging in is kind of a PITA on a mobile device. With the lists, I was automatically subscribed to all threads (which is what I was after when I subscribed) whereas with the forum I seem to be alerted to the first post and if I don’t subscribe to the thread immediately I am not notified of replys to the original post.  This ultimately leads to missing out on a lot of valuable posts.  I subscribe to many dev/user lists and I personally find that they are quite manageable with plain old email.  In regards to the historical search feature we all require, many of the lists I subscribe to are searchable on nabble.com and this works out just fine from my perspective.  Just my $.2 though.

@ryam0, it’s definitely a matter of taste.  I actually prefer not getting the messages in my inbox and instead rely on the RSS feed. 

Nathan

It appears that zoho discussions has a free-for-open-source version and they can import the existing forum data.  I like the features in it a lot better than google groups, so I am planning on switching to that, unless anyone has any reasons not to.

Nathan

Nathan,

You spend more time than anybody else on these forums, so I can understand that features count for you.
For the other hundreds of forum users, the less features and the less clutter the better.

I am not familiar with Zoho discussions, so I spent some time on http://forum.jquery.com/ as this is the only open source project advertised on Zoho. As a casual user, I did not like all the decoration around the content. Maybe more features, but the basics for “getting things done”, i.e. rapid overview, effective search and clear presentation, they all lose to Google Groups.

I think that the project would benefit most from Google Groups, as its ease of access and familiarity to many developers simply lowers the barrier to Liquibase. And that will benefit us all. Even if we lose the forum history.

My 2 cents. Thanks for listening.

Originally posted by: albatross
Nathan,

You spend more time than anybody else on these forums, so I can understand that features count for you.
For the other hundreds of forum users, the less features and the less clutter the better.

I am not familiar with Zoho discussions, so I spent some time on http://forum.jquery.com/ as this is the only open source project advertised on Zoho. As a casual user, I did not like all the decoration around the content. Maybe more features, but the basics for “getting things done”, i.e. rapid overview, effective search and clear presentation, they all lose to Google Groups.

I think that the project would benefit most from Google Groups, as its ease of access and familiarity to many developers simply lowers the barrier to Liquibase. And that will benefit us all. Even if we lose the forum history.

My 2 cents. Thanks for listening.

+1

Laird

What I was going off primarily was their http://forums.zoho.com/zoho-discussions forum.  The JQuery one does appear to do some customization of the look & feel. 

What I liked about zoho (besides the history import) was that it included some problem reporting/Q&A functionality in such as:

  • being able to track the state of a question (“answered”, “working on it”, “not a problem”)
  • “I’m having this problem too” voting

which can help me track what needs to be answered, and will hopefully help other people who want to answer questions jump into the discussion easier.

I do understand going with what users are familiar with, though.  I’ve never really used google groups, so as first glance the zoho seems more approachable and user-friendly to me than the groups interface, but that may just be me. 

Nathan

I track the posts on these forums through RSS feeds. Of late I notice the volume of SPAM is extremely high (they don’t get filtered out in RSS) - maybe the spammers are targeting well known forums or perhaps installations of the forum software being used here. The amount of moderation required must be very high I suspect.

Regards,
Shantanu