Wedge

Over at noisen.com, it's not used MUCH, but then again the website isn't very well known. I estimate that around 20% of my regular users opened a blog, usually the most regular ones. A good portion of Noisen's posts come from blog posts and comments.

Yup, I see my point was missed entirely.

First up, I'm not preventing someone else writing such a bridge. I'm merely not going to do it myself, and won't stop anyone else writing one should they choose to do so.

From my POV, there are so many things I find wrong with WP it isn't even funny... you can't even change the permissions in each group without a plugin or hacking the code directly, for example. Not to mention the seemingly never ending stream of updates and fixes they send.

The thing is, what is the physical difference between a forum and a blog? Both have posts, both have replies, an out of the box setup on WP is just a streamlined variation on a single forum board; the difference is almost entirely just presentation with some UI mojo thrown in. Since a lot of the UI mojo and underpinnings either are built or are going to be built in time for 1.0, there's very little reason to actually run two very different pieces of software when all you want is a nice blog and a forum. As a bonus you even get the facility to have a common theme for free. (To me this is more important than having a bridge)

There's no real reason why Wedge shouldn't be considered a viable CMS base for building almost anything you care to name on top of it.

Although right now Wedge's blog support needs some work -- even if it's just the theme, the message index isn't really 'clean' to me and we'll have to rewrite it to get something like Wedge.org. And posts, err... I don't think topic pages have a blog variation?

It's on my todo list, and has been for a long time. And yes, the message index isn't clean because I can't decide how it should look :/

..like Noisen/Wedge.org? :P

I can deal with it if you want... It would make sense since I'm used to it anyway. Just need to figure out how to 'present' the thing without making a new template just for blogs... (I guess we'll need to add a custom block for them.)

Why shouldn't it be a custom template? I always sort of figured it was, and it is for the message index...

MessageIndex has a custom block, not a custom template, so that's in line with what I'm looking for in the display template.
However, I'm not a big fan of reproducing the same code across two functions... I think we should do something about it.

I'm a big fan of SFS, but I'm fully aware that it's not a "fire and forget" solution; as an admin you have to do some work on each and every thing it flags as suspicious (number of times I've manually checked things on the website and found way more spam reported than the SMF plugin indicates... that's my only complaint about the plugin, in fact)

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)

All true, hence why we also have questions and a CAPTCHA :eheh:

There is no "one-size blocks all" solution to the problem, and I personally don't think there ever will be. Defence in depth is the best we've currently got, cloud-source solutions have a part to play, but more importantly admins need to keep up with the research, because (a) the people that *could* stop the bot-farms and spammers won't (the dodgy ISPs will never change their ways...), and (2) the defence measures are up against very determined attackers.

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!)

Silly idea. Add a default question called {equation}. this will make Wedge generate on the fly a very simple random equation for users to solve.

Of course that'll also keep out those who never heard of the minus sign... :lol:

Or negative numbers... what's 5 - 8 again? :lol:

It's not such a silly idea, except for the fact that so-called MATHCHA problems are generally easy for machines to solve (thanks to Google Calculator)

Actually if we were doing that, I'd rather do a plugin that generated it automatically, rather than a core feature.

3 :lol: