MyBB Review – Worst forum spam of open source forums
MyBB has been around for a while, and offers free and open source forum software. MyBB goes up against some stiff competition such as SMF or Simple Machines Forum. MyBB is arguably the easiest to use and modify forum, but it's also the absolute worst in preventing forum spam.
There have been many reports from MyBB users that their forums are under attack by spammers specifically targeting MyBB forums because they know the forums are easy to exploit and overwhelm. MyBB out of the box has almost no forum spam prevention, not even CAPTCHA or random questions during registration.
I took the time to setup a MyBB forum, and have been running it for over 3 years. During that time I have gone through all of the MyBB updates (when you log into the admin, there is a handy little tool to let you know if you are running the latest version, and if not, what the latest version is). All of the updates were to fix some kind of exploit, but none of them were for preventing forum spam.
I have been noticing in my analytics that spammers are searching for "Powered by MyBB" when targeting my forum. They are specifically looking for a MyBB forum because they know their automated activities will be able to overwhelm most board owners and moderators.
If MyBB wants to be successful, they need to release MyBB 1.6 with at least the two basic forms of trying to catch spammers at the registration level: Captcha, and asking random questions. Right now, the only MyBB spam prevention is to send a random password to the user to check their email (which doesn't work), send a confirmation email (which also doesn't work), or just let them instantly be activated.
Also, the admin only lets you see 20 users at a time, so trying to do a mass ban is very time consuming.
If you are looking for a forum that helps you in the quest of having a great community with minimal spam, stay away from the MyBB 1.4 series.
Twitter Town Hall – Obama says “Internets”
Obama. Oh man. I can't believe it when I saw this. I made immense fun of George Bush for saying "internets" and now Obama repeats the same thing during the Twitter town hall. Luckily, it was caught on video, so you can hear it for yourself:
I guess I shouldn't be so tough on the President, but this surely must have been a mistake, because afterwards he seems to have caught it and is trying to explain a bit of what he meant. Funny nonetheless. The difference here is Obama actually slipped where as George Bush to this day calls it "the internets".
HostGator is the best host for WordPress Blogs
I've used dozens of hosting companies over the years, and none stand out more than HostGator. Honestly, I was skeptical before I used them because I figured for the prices of their plans (starting at only $3.96 a month), it had to be garbage. Before I used to use GoDaddy simply because it was easy to register a domain name and then sign up for a hosting plan. The ease of having it all in one place was good, but then I ran into a lot of problems with GoDaddy hosting. Many times my site would get shut down for too much bandwidth usage, and not being able to connect to a remote database was also a struggle.
However, my friend had been using HostGator for some time, mainly for his clients, so I decided to try it out. For $3.96 a month, you get a single domain, with unlimited bandwidth and unlimited disk space, and a SSL certificate. Pretty damn cheap. I also liked that anytime I had a question, I just asked on Live Chat. Live Chat is not something that GoDaddy offers, which is a big downfall for them.
HostGator uses cPanel, and I found it familiar and easy to use. If you have multiple domains, you might want to try the $6.36 per month package where you can host unlimited domains. It's cheap, easy, and the site is pretty fast.
They seem to be optimized for bloggers because WordPress runs fast and flawless, even WordPress updates.
Highly recommended, cheap, and I will keep using them. They even claim to host 5 million domains.... Check out HostGator for their latest specials.
WordPress: html { margin-top: 28px !important; }
If you have WordPress 3.1 and you recently noticed a bar across the top of your site, you might be wondering what this is.
I did a view source on my site, and found these new lines:
<style type="text/css" media="print">#wpadminbar { display:none; }</style>
<style type="text/css">
html { margin-top: 28px !important; }
* html body { margin-top: 28px !important; }
</style>
At first I couldn't tell what program was inserting these, so I downloaded my newly updated site to a local drive, and used Notepad++ to do a file search.
It turns out this is due to the new admin bar in WordPress 3.1, and you can only see it if you are logged in as an admin, your users can't see it. Some people think this is a bug in WordPress 3.1, but it's not.
If you want to get rid of this bar, put this line in your functions.php:
add_filter( 'show_admin_bar', '__return_false' );
You can hide parts of the admin bar with CSS. To remove the comments and the appearance options add this to your stylesheet:
#wp-admin-bar-comments {display:none;}
#wp-admin-bar-appearance {display:none;}
This will help you remove the admin bar in WordPress 3.1 and get rid of that annoying 28px margin!