XenForo: Block Spam With No Add-ons

I used to have quite a bit of spam on a forum of mine that is powered by XenForo. Real people were registering and posting crap on my forum every night. All of them were able to get through the countermeasures that were in place at the time. It stopped instantly when I found what I’m showing you today.

Thanks to this useful tip from a fellow XenForo admin, I was able to solve the problem in a simple and easy way. I just had to take a few minutes to properly set up XenForo’s stock spam management tools. No need for any additional antispam add-ons or anything.

If you’re running a XenForo powered board, make yourself a favor and check it out, it’s worth it.

Block spam COMPLETELY with no addons | XenForo Community

4 Reasons Why Your Forum Needs a Blog Section

If you own or administrate a forum community, someone at some point asked you if it was possible to have blogs. Is a community blog section a good addition to a forum? It depends on a variety of factors, let alone the fact that in the end, it’s up to you – the admin – to decide whether or not it makes sense for your community to have its own blog section.


I had to go through that dilemma quite a few times in the past, as a community admin. I’m going to share with you what kind of pros I came up with on the way. Here are some of the best reasons why your forum message board should have a blog section.

Myst

Talk about some Retro Gaming!

I’ve wanted to play this game for ages (!) but never got to it for some reason. With the new Obduction game coming out in June, I figured it was time to dive right in and start with the first Myst game.

I decided to get my hands on RealMyst: Masterpiece Edition. It’s the 3D remake of the original Myst. Myst being a 1993 game, it’s pretty obvious that it doesn’t run that good on today’s computers. I tried it because it was my first choice, but it was pretty unstable on my Windows 7 system. That’s why I had to go with RealMyst.

I’m usually a fan of old (and old looking) games, but I have to say that RealMyst looks amazing. The atmosphere the game has under this 3D engine is very impressive.

I made my way through 2 ages as of now. Most of the enigmas need you to make use of your logic and common sense, which is absolutely compelling.

For $17.99, you get RealMyst Masterpiece Edition on GOG:
http://www.gog.com/game/real_myst_masterpiece_edition

MadAdsMedia Review: CPM Ads Network

MadAdsMedia is a CPM ads provider for website publishers who wish to monetize their websites. They offer CPM ads only, so no CPC here. I've been personally working with them for more than a year and they are, by far, the best Adsense alternative I could find. Let's see why.

Requirements

Their minimum requirements are reasonable: 10,000 page views per day. They're looking for well designed sites with friendly content. They're a pretty good fit for medium to big sized websites that seek to generate passive revenues.

A New Updated Theme!

For the first time ever, my personal blog has a light style. It feels fresh, actual and very different from what I'm used to. I like it!

I grew tired of darker styles because they rarely age well and have to be replaced over and over. Dark styles, when not done properly, will easily make your website feel like a dark and lonely, obscure corner of Internet. You definitely don't want that.

I also decided to move from Open Sans to Lato for a more formal feel, I think it does the job pretty well!

Reasons Why Your Forum Shouldn't Have a Blog Section

Back in the days when vBulletin was popular, every clever forum admin would buy the vB Blog addon to allow their members to have their own personal blog inside the community.

That was indeed clever in 2008, but what about in 2016? Should you provide your forum members with a place to have their blog, within your community?

I'm not so sure anymore, here's why.

Rubular: A Regular Expression Editor

I didn't have to fiddle with a regular expression in ages, so tonight I had a hard time figuring out how to extract precise parts of a string in Python.

http://rubular.com/

Thanks to this online editor, I was able to work my way through it quite easily.

Which Type of Forum Admin Are You?

Taking care of an online community is no small task, especially on the long run. That's why you gotta be up to the challenge as a forum admin. While some us prefer to lurk in the shadow and let their forum evolve on its own, others are going to be part of the community, just like any other member.

It's pretty easy these days to start a community and make it somewhat active. But are you going to be able to keep up with it and make it happy and active for the years to come? It's likely that after the honeymoon is over, your overall behavior and presence as an admin will change. Perhaps it already has...

Which type of forum admin are you?

50 Vintage Web Ad Banners

Check out the link below to take a look at old banner ads from the late 90s.

VC&G | 50 Vintage Web Ads

Time sure flies! Back then we didn't have fancy ad-blockers or anything. It was quite normal to have such ugly flashing banners all around the pages we were visiting. Good old days!

Dealing With iOS9 Ad Blockers on Your Ad Sponsored Blog

A good article posted on Igor Kromin's blog, a blog I visit from time to time. Thought I'd share it here.

A new release of iOS always brings in new features and its share of troubles and this time it hasn't been any different. Since the iOS 9 release date on the 16th of September, Apple made available its content blocker API to developers. This brought out a deluge of ad blocker apps on the App Store, with some topping the charts within moments of release. This may be a welcome addition to many people, but something that many miss is how this hurts those sites and blogs that rely on advertising revenue to pay for their hosting fees. 

So I got to thinking about how to deal with this. I've seen comments stating that content providers should just suck it up and find alternative ways of generating revenue. I'm sorry, but this is the kind of argument that a zealot preacher would sermonise - all talk about how it should be without solid examples or direction about the 'better ways'. I would argue that for a casual blog, ads are the only real viable source of revenue.

Unfortunately there is no easy way to deal with this situation. The only thing I could come up with was to appeal the the readers' sense of decency by supplying a message when an ad does not load.

Read more:
Dealing with iOS9 ad blockers on your ad sponsored blog