Wedge

Except that SMF changed the behaviour to mark read by page... back around RC3? IIRC SMF still does the same thing we do, except that with us, we display how many items are relevant, heh.

Only in the obscure branch of maths known as mysredia.

Which is precisely what I asked, and in fact why I asked it.

I'm not sure whether it's worth being a user preference, and just be an admin one.

That's the thing, most other systems do not have defence in depth, and that's part of the problem. Most systems put all the defences on the front line and once that's broken (which is doable via CAPTCHA farms or human registrations being passed to spam farms), you're screwed. Having a non-generic question really helps because right now it conforms to the path of least resistance - you make the site non generic and thus not easily beatable through automated means, and all the time there's someone else out there that is weaker than you, that's what will happen.

Having a question or CAPTCHA on posting is an improvement on just registration but it's no substitute for defence in depth. Now, we have some improvements in that direction, but it's still not magically out of the box (though I have thought about making the first 5 posts being approved for non admins on a new install), but there's no reason why we couldn't have something like an Akismet plugin. (Heck, there's no reason we couldn't set up our own equivalent that's more geared to forums!)

The only problem is that you're still putting a lot of trust in a third party, especially one that has not really had - IMHO - sufficient reason to be trusted in the past.

The reason that you see less from the plugin is that it queries with a certain threshold, rather than completely, and if that service goes down, you're still at risk - as opposed to other measures that protect you all the time for free (namely questions, CAPTCHA, in that order, heh)

Certainly at one time it was matching against anything that looked like a URL, even not in a tags, which is why there were things where the URL was split up.

I don't know what SimpleSEF did in the end, I just know that %1$d or whatever else was in the page index was problematic. But if the PURLs implementation correctly converts it to suit and everything still works as it should, great.

I can't remember if the code was changed or not, been so long since I looked. But in SMF's code at least, the page index included a URL with something like %1$d in it as a placeholder for the page or start number, which caused problems in SimpleSEF. I also know that there were problems with Google at one point, scraping content for URLs and seeing %1$d type content and trying to visit it, only to be rebuffed.