Down the pipeline

[Dobber]

In the works:

- New shopping cart, in-house and no longer using Paypal
- Wider pages. With increase in screen widths, it's time to take advantage of the room
- Faster site (still trying to fix this)
- New forum (tied in with the faster site point above)

For both DobberHockey and DobberBaseball

[mister_mcgoo]

good deal Dobber, have you decided on a new forums platform yet or are you still evaluating them?

[Dobber]

Still evaluating. Any to recommend
?

[GoalieGuild]

Any plans to do live chats on a more consistent basis? I think those are golden for you.

Oh, and have you ever thought of a super-simple and cheap Iphone App??

[doulos]

Was hoping there might be a podcast announcement - oh well!

[mister_mcgoo]

Still evaluating. Any to recommend
?

well actually vBulletin is one of the best in the business so I'm not sure why you're looking to move off it? Is it an expense thing or does it not do some things that you need or what to integrate into the site as a whole?

I do quite a bit of dev with Wordpress which gives you a ton of functionality out of the box. They have many forum packages that will run on it, but BBPress is the default so you might want to look into that.

Shoot me an email or IM if you want some advice on what you're trying to do and the rationale behind it and I might have some suggestions

[Dobber]

Any plans to do live chats on a more consistent basis? I think those are golden for you.

Oh, and have you ever thought of a super-simple and cheap Iphone App??

live chats - would be nice for special events, as you know about the draft day one we'll do.

Iphone app - yes, for my rankings. I'd do it for BB though - Iphone=more casual, BB=more business people (fantasy hockey has a stronger presence there)

[Dobber]

Was hoping there might be a podcast announcement - oh well!

That would be nice. I haven't forgotten and am still in touch with Andrew.

[Dobber]

well actually vBulletin is one of the best in the business so I'm not sure why you're looking to move off it? Is it an expense thing or does it not do some things that you need or what to integrate into the site as a whole?

I may not switch, but I was told by a couple of web developers that I was silly to go with VB when there were free options online that are superior. We'll see. DobberBaseball has some functionality problems with it, and DobberHockey is getting spammed like #^%#^$#^%. The auto-registering has to stop and VB isn't stopping it. Even after I throw money at the problem for add-ons and fixes.

[mister_mcgoo]

I may not switch, but I was told by a couple of web developers that I was silly to go with VB when there were free options online that are superior. We'll see. DobberBaseball has some functionality problems with it, and DobberHockey is getting spammed like #^%#^$#^%. The auto-registering has to stop and VB isn't stopping it. Even after I throw money at the problem for add-ons and fixes.

yeah they're right that there are dozens of free options out there, but none of them are going to fully eliminate spam unfortunately. These attacks are never especially targetted at you, these bots just continually scan the internet looking for vulnerabilities or that you are running a certain platform. Since vB is the defacto standard for the web, its also unfortunately the heaviest targeted

One of the things I would try first Dobber, if you have a developer that can help you out is to change all the default paths and files for your site. So for example, right now you are using the out-of-the-box defaults for:

Registration: http://www.dobberhockey.com/forums/register.php
Login: http://www.dobberhockey.com/forums/login.php

that's the first thing the bots look for...but if you were to take those pages and rename them to something obscure (lets say stripper names so you'd have trixie.php and candy.php) and then change it in the vB admin I bet you'd cut down on the spam significantly

[Scribe]

yeah they're right that there are dozens of free options out there, but none of them are going to fully eliminate spam unfortunately. These attacks are never especially targetted at you, these bots just continually scan the internet looking for vulnerabilities or that you are running a certain platform. Since vB is the defacto standard for the web, its also unfortunately the heaviest targeted

One of the things I would try first Dobber, if you have a developer that can help you out is to change all the default paths and files for your site. So for example, right now you are using the out-of-the-box defaults for:

Registration: http://www.dobberhockey.com/forums/register.php
Login: http://www.dobberhockey.com/forums/login.php

that's the first thing the bots look for...but if you were to take those pages and rename them to something obscure (lets say stripper names so you'd have trixie.php and candy.php) and then change it in the vB admin I bet you'd cut down on the spam significantly

That's good advice, McGoo. You sound like a real smart guy, but you obviously don't have very good taste in strip bars. Candy's OK, but Trixie?

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