Return of some Visual Accents

[DerVVulfman]

Return of some Visual Accents

Dear friends,

You may have noticed that the Forum Stats window has returned.  Given that it is dead in your face when you log in and enter the forum, it is kinda hard to miss.  The Forum Stats is one of three features that have been re-introduced this week.

For the Forum Stats, you will notice that it only contains two sets of stats, the newest members on the left and the most recent posts on the right.  It was thought that including statistics such as 'most posts' or 'most thanks' would make people think of posting as some form of contest, and could induce nonsensical spam as a way to increase score.  This had, in fact, was an issue before with some members.

The Thanks feature was reintroduced, however there are some issues with it.  The 'thanks' given within a member's posts are not being shown, tests showing that older thanks are tied but boolean on/off conditions in the Thanks records did not fully restore.  You can see in a member's postbit the number of thanks they had given just fine. And new thanks can be given without issue.  But older instances tend to not reveal themselves.

And finally, a bit of levity was added with the funny quotes returning to the main page.  The quotes line merely appears below the forum statistics window and changes the quote on every refresh of the page.

What these three features have in common is that there is no actual member input other than merely clicking on a button.  The shoutbox had not returned due to a vulnerability found within.  And many other plugins such as the Awards system had vulnerabilities too, and the author had written numerous plugins which the September hackers attacked.

However, these three were found safe and able to be re-installed.  And our safeguards have been blocking plenty of spammers as of recent, including some would-be repeat offenders from the September hack.  There are now no worries of these incidents reoccurring.