I'm sure many of you will have noticed that there have recently been a number of unwanted posts on this forum from an overseas gambling group. This started back in June and there have been quite a few further posts since, particularly in the last week.
I am now monitoring this on a daily basis and deleting posts as they occur. I have also asked John Wright to help and he has been banning Users based on their IP Address.
There is a fundamental issue here in that the only person with full Administration rights is the forum creator, Liam Willis, who is no longer involved with the forum or club. I believe only an Administrator can ban a User based on their email address/Login name which is what we really need in this instance.
Accordingly, I have contacted Sparklit, the software company who created and support the ActiveBoard forums, in an attempt to obtain Administrator rights for the forum moderators. The problem is that they obviously cannot do this without the permission of the forum owner, Liam Willis, who they are now attempting to contact.
If anyone knows how to contact Liam, please could you send me a private message so that I can pass his details on to Sparkalit. Hopefully we can then get this nonsense resolved.
It also makes absolute sense that this forum is moderated and administered by a number of people who are all viewing the forum on a fairly regular basis.
Quick update on this.......
Sparkalit contacted me on Monday to say they had received authority to pass over full Administration rights on this forum.
On Tuesday, I put a ban on seven unwanted visitors who had been plaguing the site for about three months with regular gambling related posts in an unidentifed language.
There is actually nothing to stop them creating a new email address and User account and posting again since there is no approval process on this forum. However it's far more effort for them to do that than for me to ban them again.
Anyway, no sign of them turning up yet.
Pretty sure from memory ( when I was the admin a few years back ) that you can set up email verification Of new accounts if you want Mick if you now have full access to the settings.
Yes you can certainly do that, Dan.
I have created a couple of forums using the same ActiveBoard software so have some experience of how this can be configured.
That said it would be a bit of a nuisance having to verify every new account and there have been very few instances of anybody trying to use this forum for anything other than bona fide football discussions.
Personally I like the idea that supporters from other clubs can come on here as a one-off visitor and share their opinions on a particular match.
Clearly without any New User verification we need to be on top of moderation. However as far as I am concerned everybody is welcome so long as they play by the rules.