Dandello wrote on Jun 20
th, 2013 at 3:49pm:
... my personal take is to start as strict as possible and loosen up when/if members come back and say they've started having problems.
Edited: Dandello wrote on Jun 20
th, 2013 at 8:55pm:
And I should add - when I say strict I don't mean to have everything turned off - I'm merely referring to not allowing much interaction between YaBB and the rest of the world except when it comes through 'proper' channels - the program hosted on my domain.
Admittedly, this
is a safe way to operate a forum. Still ...
Dandello is most certainly an expert on how YaBB operates. However, I respectfully
disagree have a different opinion than she has on this one because I know what's working in our forum.
I've seen YaBB forums be so restrictive with the way they use
Referrer Security that those forums become very user unfriendly. Particularly when a forum doesn't have an easy way to send a message to its administrator or to the site's webmaster, and a great many forums do not provide this, it's not likely that problems will be reported. People will simply stay away.
Hint: The better your forum is at stopping spam-bots, the more generous you can be in allowing actions from outside domains.
Particularly with the use of
ggn's anti-spam CAPTCHA hack,
Referral Security Checking is no longer necessary despite what
"experts" will tell you (
you can read more about that here). I've disabled it entirely in our forum without any problems.
Keep in mind that I'm not a YaBB expert,
just a regular admin with a fair knowledge of how YaBB works, and yet, the forum I operate no longer has problems with spam-bots. So if I can do this, pretty much anybody can.
If you've noticed, there seem to be quite a few YaBB forums that have registration disabled (
registration is processed via email). You could do that, too, but how restrictive do you really want to be?
Edited: You can see how this anti-spam CAPTCHA works in
Dandello's YaBB 2.5.4 Alpha test bed forum (
on the 2nd page of her registration form). Thankfully, she's included this as a mod in YaBB's next, and newest version, of which she's the lead developer (
this mod has been authored/updated by Derek Barnstorm with ggn's happy approval).