Alakamin server has forums (for real this time)

[Davood]

Alakamin has forums

alakamin.us.to/f

i went with phbb, it requires registration and confirmation of your humanity through an email link activation.
Currently there is only one forum, i will at some point.. create more, and repost the readonly forums from Alakamin of days past.

[Tabasco]

I'm not sure how your hosting is set up, but email registrations can be a huge pain. If your forums are related to your server and you have the ability to manipulate your phpbb install, you can validate the client IP address against your server's account IP's.

A user just has to log in to the server once and then register from the same IP.
Relevant phpbb file: www/includes/ucp/ucp_register.php
You can select the ip out of account_ip or make a web-accessible script on your emu server that does it, then you just use fopen to get the result.

You might not need it if your host has a reputable IP, but for emu servers in particular I think it's a good alternative confirmation.

[sorvani]

Email confirmation is a standard practice for almost any service you register for. How is it a huge pain? If a user is too stupid to get their email and click a link they do not need to post anyway.

IP authentication is going to have its own problems as a lot of people have constantly changing public IP addresses from their ISP.

[Davood]

my hosting -> 4 linux boxes (lots of vms as well) in my basement in a specially built little room

im happy with email confirmation, not really interested in changing it based on the same argument sorvani has issues, plus the fact that I don't really want to spend the time doing it (lazy-factor)

one thing that is cool is that we have collectively bumped this thread
thank you !

[Tabasco]

Email confirmation is a standard practice for almost any service you register for. How is it a huge pain? If a user is too stupid to get their email and click a link they do not need to post anyway.

IP authentication is going to have its own problems as a lot of people have constantly changing public IP addresses from their ISP.

It's a pain maintaining IP reputation and actually getting your email sent to the player. If you're on shared hosting it's just about hopeless unless you have time to maintain feedback loops and RBL removal requests.

The IP check is done once at registration, so it doesn't matter if it changes later, it's only a one-time confirmation.

In any case, it was just a suggestion and I mentioned it because it has made my life a lot easier. Our initial forums were hosted on residential DSL and email confirmation simply was not an option.

[Davood]

i built my own email server and im following all (most?) of the rules for email servers.. so far only hotmail accounts are putting my sent emails into the junk box. yahoo, gmail, and everyone else seem ok with my server sending out emails.

[Davood]

oh and im not sure waht you mean by "shared hosting" but i can tell you that i have a "business internet" connection (for my business), and am not restricted by any of the residential customer problems (no ports are blocked by my isp.. however i do block ports and other stuff on my firewall haha)

i do see where you are coming from with the email confirmation issues. and it could become a problem if someone manages to get through all of my tricks and traps adn send emails from my network somehow and gets me blacklisted on spamhaus.org or somewhere.

i am going to save your suggestion in a "jhust in case" folder adn i will explore it if i need to later on

thank you for the suggestion tabasco.