Board upgrade...

[davesmith_au]

Giday all, you'll likely notice we've just upgraded to a new theme, called (what else?) "thunderbolts".

(NOTE: Only registered users who are logged in see the site-specific board)

A huge THANK YOU to Charles Chandler without whose initiative and assistance the change would not have taken place.

This brings the forum more in line with the Thunderbolts site proper, and also makes it 'ours', for want of a better way of explaining it.

Should anyone experience any difficulties with the new theme, if it's a technical problem you notice, just PM me.

If you just don't like the new theme, the old themes are still available via your User Control Panel (UCP)

Just go to your UCP (via the link on the upper left of this page, under the Board index), select "Board preferences" and go down to "My board style" and click on the drop-down menu.

Select either "prosilver" (the old default style) or "subsilver2", scroll to the bottom and click "Submit", and you're done!

Apologies to anyone who had difficulty with the board within the half-hour prior to me posting this, we also performed a phpBB3 upgrade and this process took us off-line for a short time.

Cheers, Dave Smith.
Forum Administrator.

[davesmith_au]

Also, we will now start to prune those members who appear to be spammers, spam-bots, or otherwise not interested in posting to our forum.

We have upgraded the registration procedure in an effort to thwart the 5 to 50 attempted spam registrations we receive every day. Since implementing the new procedure, we have all but stopped the 'bots in their tracks.

At present, we have just over 400 members who have zero posts. Though we realize there will be legitimate members among this group, we will be deleting the vast majority of them in an effort to have a board which more accurately reflects our audience. We will attempt to leave bona fide members on the board, but it is inevitable that we will inadvertently cull some in this process, and if this happens to you we apologize, simply take out a new registration.

Should you have a "zero posts" membership and like to remain a registered member, please log in and PM the moderators or admin to let us know you want your membership to remain intact.

Dave Smith.
Forum Administrator.

[xraydela]

Hello,

Yes, I just found out that I was one of those 'pruned' as I had to re-register tonight (no big deal).
I did have several (old) posts.
By the way, how far back doe the Forum database now go? I could not find any of my old posts (one of which is when I brought Stephen Crothers to the attention of this group almost exactly two years ago in October 2007.)

In any case, please keep me on as a Forum member as I occasionally may happen upon a relevant new item (and post it quickly enough! This Forum is kind of like the 'Drudge Report' for EU in that you got 'eagle eyed' members who quickly spot and post new scientific findings relevant to EU.)

xraydela

[davesmith_au]

Giday xraydela, thanks for the input.

Incidentally, the posts you speak of two or more years ago no longer exist, they were lost in the "Great Crash of '08"... The original forum was lost due to a catastrophic failure on the old host and their failure to provide any support at all. Now we have a much better host and backups in case anything goes astray. The most we stand to lose in any future loss would be a couple of weeks worth of posts.

But we may well have inadvertently culled your membership, for which we're sorry. At the moment we're going through the list of members who have zero posts (since May '08 when the new forum went on-line) and who have been "inactive" since before six months ago. That is, they haven't even visited the board in that time. Even though we're sure to cull folk who would rather not be culled, there is no way of knowing which are bona fide parties and which are not, and the bottom line is it's not exactly difficult to re-register if you need to.

What will be more difficult will be culling the more recent ones, the forum experienced a flood of spam sign-ups over the last several months until we added a custom field to the sign-up process. Whilst the most obvious of these were culled almost immediately, there are obviously some which remain.

So the very bottomest of lines is that if you're a genuine interested person and we cull your membership, we are profoundly sorry but you will have to re-register, not a difficult task and when balanced with having a more representative membership, is the best way to go about de-spamming the membership.

The last thing we want is your son or daughter clicking on a link in a member profile only to be taken to a porn site or have a virul downloaded onto their machine.

Cheers, Dave.