Anyone having issues with Us Militaria Forums?

[Badger]

I was curious, so I had a quick look at their forums ....

The appear to be running heavily modded version of vBulletin which is the same software we use, although they've removed from the bottom of the forum display, the copyright line ie: Copyright © 2012 vBulletin Solutions, Inc. All rights reserved, which is a violation of vBulletin's license agreement. As a consequence and unless they've been granted a "branding free" license in perpetuity, they could lose that license if vBulletin finds out and decides to enforce their copyright. However, that's not my problem, but I found it interesting as I've never seen any vBulletin site do that before.

I also don't understand the lag in registration requirements, as it's a vBulletin automated process and can be done in less than 5 minutes. If the excuse is that they need to protect themselves against spammers, it's simply not necessary to cause such a poor service restriction to accomplish that mission.

We've used vBulletin for over 6 years and yes, you get spammers attempting to break in and post ads for porno and cell phones. Our site gets over 500 hits per day trying that.

In our case, we use add-on programs that protect the site and 99% of spammers don't get past the front door. There is the odd one that I'm sure you've seen post a "cell phone" ad here, only because he went to extensive lengths to follow the rules in registering and managed to get his "single" post up in a forum. Usually that post only lasts a matter of minutes, as one of the moderators sees it, or a member clicks on the "report post" button and it's deleted, with the spammer being banned and his IP address blocked and reported automatically to StopForumSpam's Database. That database gets checked by us every time someone registers and if they are a reported spammer, they get rejected, so, they move onto easier pickings.

I suspect that there's more going on with their site than meets the eye. I don't know what or why, but it could be as simple as the site owner or administrator doesn't know how to use HTML code and add the protections that we do, or in fact, most large vBulletin sites do. However, since someone manged to heavily modify the vBulletin code they are using, it would seem to me that someone at some point had the expertise to do that, so you'd think they could easily address the blocking of spammers issue.

I don't know the owners, but if they wanted someone to fix and improve their site, simplifying the registration process, while protecting themselves against spammers, I'd be pleased to help them out if requested to do so.

As collectors, we need as many quality collecting sites as possible, to help keep the hobby alive and growing with newer generations.

Regards,
Doug