Folks Of Interest Social Forums & The Future

For years now the Social Forums have been a thorn in my side - equal parts security risk and moderation nightmare.

They were built on old bones, outdated tech that takes too much grease just to keep limping along. Every year the bad actors get smarter, the attacks get nastier, and it costs me more blood and treasure just to keep the thing from becoming a backdoor into the rest of the forum.

That leaves me with two choices:

1. Keep shoveling money and man-hours into it, slapping on band-aids while dragging the rest of the forum’s security down.
   
   
2. Kill it outright.

And the numbers don’t lie... only about 2.3% of you even look at the Social Forums. With usage that low, I think it’s time to put this dog down. Better to lose a limb than poison the whole body.

I'm not sure of the time frame yet... The feature is broken right now and I'm trying to find a way to fix it without too much downtime or opening the forum's security.

So there’s a chance this is effective immediately.

 

This is the only content I care about (that I can think of at least)... I will try to extract it if nothing else... No promises.

I'm super frustrated right now and probably ought to step away a bit.

 

In my opinion the social forums have been a place for people to post content that would have been off topic on the main board. I for one will not miss it. There is one thread there in particular called calendar girls that is borderline pornography and there is no reason that Ryan should have to host that kind of garbage

 

I don't really care about that thread in particular...

The real problem is bigger, darker. Any forum running those old social groups becomes a magnet for the absolute worst kind of filth—illegal porn that makes your skin crawl just thinking about it. Sick bastards, not bots, not some faceless spam farm in Russia. Real people here in the States who sniff out old platforms with social features and use them to build private hideouts for their garbage.

I end up fighting this battle at least once a year, usually more. And it’s brutal, because you can’t just flip a switch or block an IP range. These aren’t random hits from overseas servers, they’re “normal” users who slip in looking like anyone else… until they start poisoning the place.

And it often takes me weeks to know that poison has been uploaded as I don't regularly monitor social forums... If I did, it would takes hours a day.

 

No. Not even close. That's part of the problem. This joint is essentially a one off... and that makes upgrading software packages very difficult.

It's based off Xenforo... but it is HEAVILY modified. I don't think this place would exist anymore if it weren't for those mods though.

Only thing is, I'm not in the business of being in business. I'm in the business of saving information for the generations that come after us.

I will do my best to find a way to at least save some of that data. But I'm not gonna go nuts and spend thousands to save data that only 2.3% of our users ever access.

 

No. There is no way for users to download content from a Social Forum.

Time Frame? I have no idea. I'm very frustrated with it at the moment and need some air for a bit.

Gone? Too late? None of the data was compromised. I still have it. Making it accessible opens up the rest of the forum and the content I value more to nefarious shit. I'm not willing to do that. So, I'm left with the two options I mention in my first post.

Basically, I've decided that I don't want to host social forums any longer... but I also don't want to lose any data that people find important. Not sure what I am gonna do.