MystOnline.com moving - and forum UPDATE

Tomala · **Posted:** Sat Jun 22, 2013 10:16 am

Big Mac wrote:

There's a bit of "cleaning up" the database to do once the snapshot is taken. JW Platt has mentioned the mixed formats but there's also some purging of about 600,000 spam accounts to do. That's why Cyan are being cautious and allowing themselves a couple days for the migration rather than a couple of hours

That's a good thing to do. Plus spam management is a lot better under bb3. Especially a few updates ago when they introduced a registration question.

joclyn · **Joined:** Wed May 10, 2006 12:51 am **Posts:** 517

600,000 spam accounts??

:shock:

realXCV · **Posted:** Mon Jun 24, 2013 2:55 am

joclyn wrote:

600,000 spam accounts??

:shock:

There are still 59,710 non-spam accounts.

Annabelle · **Posted:** Mon Jun 24, 2013 4:11 am

joclyn wrote:

600,000 spam accounts??

:shock:

Yes approximately between 300 to 400 accounts everyday. I remember when we were only 300,000 members :lol:

If they can control that anarchy it would be a great improvement

Alien · **Posted:** Mon Jun 24, 2013 7:33 am

Big Mac wrote:

There's a bit of "cleaning up" the database to do once the snapshot is taken. JW Platt has mentioned the mixed formats but there's also some purging of about 600,000 spam accounts to do. That's why Cyan are being cautious and allowing themselves a couple days for the migration rather than a couple of hours

Tomala wrote:

That's a good thing to do. Plus spam management is a lot better under bb3. Especially a few updates ago when they introduced a registration question.

A few days ago, I changed the Sleepers forum registration from a captcha to a question ... it went from hundreds of spam accounts per day to zero.

So if the admin of this forum see this, make your registration a question.

Tai'lahr · **Posted:** Mon Jun 24, 2013 11:01 am

Alien wrote:

So if the admin of this forum see this, make your registration a question.

And, they shouldn't be too easy, either. For example, don't ask who the main character is in Myst. Instead, ask things like, "what was Gehn's wife's name?" or "who wrote the Age of Myst?" or better yet, have them translate a D'ni word or phrase - and it's written in D'ni lettering. :twisted:

chrissifniotis · **Posted:** Mon Jun 24, 2013 11:48 am

Tai'lahr wrote:

Alien wrote:

So if the admin of this forum see this, make your registration a question.

And, they shouldn't be too easy, either. For example, don't ask who the main character is in Myst. Instead, ask things like, "what was Gehn's wife's name?" or "who wrote the Age of Myst?" or better yet, have them translate a D'ni word or phrase - and it's written in D'ni lettering. :twisted:

Valor! Valor b'mot!
>>
<<
Practicing my D'ni for the migration.

janaba1 · **Posted:** Mon Jun 24, 2013 12:09 pm

I'd like to think that this is all just a joke lol ... and I'd say, or at least that's what I believed this place to be by now, this is resp. these are the official forums of Cyan Worlds for all of their games, means for all people having felt the call consciously or unconsciously, which could be even those that haven't played Myst/Riven/Uru or any of the Myst series yet by now, or those being led here through a FB or whatever ad for any of all the games by Cyan Worlds or whomever (fan-/games website) etc. ... Yeah, just sayin' ...

Tomala · **Posted:** Mon Jun 24, 2013 2:13 pm

Alien wrote:

A few days ago, I changed the Sleepers forum registration from a captcha to a question ... it went from hundreds of spam accounts per day to zero.

yes, I've had that feature active for a couple of weeks now at my site. Nice to not have any bots to delete during my lunch breaks.

Tai'lahr · **Posted:** Mon Jun 24, 2013 2:15 pm

Yes, Janaba, I was joking. It was just an expression of frustration with the spammers who seem to keep finding ways around the walls erected to keep them out. But, of course, we want to make it possible for legitimate fans to register - even if they're not proficient in D'ni history. :wink:

JWPlatt · **Posted:** Mon Jun 24, 2013 3:05 pm

OpenUru.org has been using phpBB3's Q&A method for some years now. Be aware that while it is effective, it may only be effective for a longer time - not forever. The same human solvers who make CAPTCHA useless by putting answers into a spammer database also do the same thing for Q&A. I had some fairly clever questions in our Q&A such as "What color is green" or "Correct this sentence: There throwing they're ball over their." Math or common knowledge Q&A was solved more easily so I leaned on language tricks. Even these things were solved. Despite Q&A we eventually began to get up to six registrations an hour. Only requiring membership in a specific usergroup, like Explorers here, stopped spambot posts. So now I use a single registration Q&A question representing a public "invite code" which I openly share (it's "Shorah") and post on the forums but the spammers wouldn't know without expensive (for them) research. It makes registration more difficult because newcomers often have to email webmaster for the code, and that's the price of security, but it has been entirely effective.

Alien · **Posted:** Mon Jun 24, 2013 4:24 pm

JWPlatt wrote:

OpenUru.org has been using phpBB3's Q&A method for some years now. Be aware that while it is effective, it may only be effective for a longer time - not forever. The same human solvers who make CAPTCHA useless by putting answers into a spammer database also do the same thing for Q&A. I had some fairly clever questions in our Q&A such as "What color is green" or "Correct this sentence: There throwing they're ball over their." Math or common knowledge Q&A was solved more easily so I leaned on language tricks. Even these things were solved. Despite Q&A we eventually began to get up to six registrations an hour. Only requiring membership in a specific usergroup, like Explorers here, stopped spambot posts. So now I use a single registration Q&A question representing a public "invite code" which I openly share (it's "Shorah") and post on the forums but the spammers wouldn't know without expensive (for them) research. It makes registration more difficult because newcomers often have to email webmaster for the code, and that's the price of security, but it has been entirely effective.

I made the Sleepers forum question very easy to answer for a new player, someone who isn't familiar with all the lore of Uru, a question they'd almost certainly know the answer to if they have downloaded MOULa and started playing it.

But the Sleepers forum still requires your account to be activated, so if someone did register, I still have to activate their account, much like this forum's Explorer's Group (I could do that, but haven't).

I don't agree that the question should be hard to answer, suppose someone new to all this wants to register, are they going to know advanced canon stuff?

Anyway, I look forward to the new MOULa forum.

Tai'lahr · **Posted:** Mon Jun 24, 2013 4:48 pm

JWPlatt wrote:

I had some fairly clever questions in our Q&A such as... ..."Correct this sentence: There throwing they're ball over their."

I'm afraid this question would exclude some of our regular posters who haven't quite mastered the English language, yet.

Lyrositor · **Joined:** Sun Aug 08, 2010 2:14 pm **Posts:** 808

Well, this looks... different. I'm glad it went this fast, although I must say, some parts of the updated theme are a bit jarring. Maybe I just need to get used to it.

johnsojc · **Posted:** Tue Jun 25, 2013 6:57 pm

Very nice... just one little thing I've noticed... for some reason, the Top link doesn't seem to work. (maybe it's just me... :wink:

)

My memory for anchors and such was always fuzzy but this is what I think may be the problem... (probably not)

Code:

and I think the point you were trying to get to is coded

Code:

MystOnline.com moving - and forum UPDATE

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