I am tiring of the spammers. The hardcore spammers are in possession of a hack that can read phpBB's
CAPTCHA ... essentially making it useless, and giving them carte blanche to create spam accounts. I've been rabidly diligent recently, deleting them as fast as they appear. But this is getting old. phpBB has some 'tweaks' you can make to make it more difficult for the spammer ... but they're mostly speedbumps, not barriers ... and they're a real hassle to deal with ... all kinds of code editing, bunches of files -- and if a bug-fix/security upgrade for phpBB comes out -- and you install it? Wheee, you've just wiped out all that 'modding' you did, and would have to start all that over again from scratch, to get the 'mods' you wanted back again.
The long and short of it, is I'm entertaining thoughts of upgrading the Forum software to vBulletin. As good as phpBB is, I think vBulletin is bigger, badder, better. It'll have a CAPTCHA module (and god knows what else) that won't be swiss cheese to the spammers. It even has an import module that would make a transition painless. It can import users, message posts, the whole kit-n'-kaboodle, no problem.
The look-n'-feel of the Forum would likely change a bit -- though I'd certainly try and have a theme that was as closest as possible to our current one. Every neat thingie we like about phpBB, we should have available to us under vBulletin. And I'm sure we'd be getting a few extra doo-dads we don't have right now.
The only 'catch', so to speak, is that vBulletin isn't free. But you know what? At this point, I could really care less. I'd be happy to shell out a few bucks, so I wouldn't have to deal with those !@(*%^ spammers getting accounts in every few hours -- all day -- every day. M----r F----r, if I ever found out where a couple of the more annoying ones lived .... they would not be happy.
So anyway! Money, not the problem. Getting everything here, over? messages, users, and all that? not a problem. So what do you think?
