Thread: Major Forum Changes Ahead

I have some time off this Friday, so I plan to work on the forum. I will be changing the way user deletion works.
It's no surprise we've had to delete a lot of spam accounts in the past few years, and the original deletion feature implemented for spammers of this type creates a new thread for each user in the moderator's lounge.
Well, that's turned out to be WAY too many threads, overloading that sub-forum, and also just filling my own (and Kyle's) thread creation list with mostly useless garbage.
I often use my own thread creation list to find old thread's I've made, and these new threads are making that obnoxious. I'm sure @Kyle isn't happy about it either.

So, I'll be making one giant thread for these to be posted to. I will also do the work to clean up the existing threads, and move the posts to this one-giant-thread-to-rule-them-all.

I know this isn't a cool update for anyone but myself and maybe Kyle, but it is happening.

Update (Version 1.5.4)

I've updated the spam-bot obliteration feature to post staff notifications all in one giant master thread instead of having a new thread per event.
This involved a minor code change, but a large, complicated database transition to move all of the posts to the one main thread, update that thread's metadata, and then delete the now-empty threads.

This is really nice, since now the staff notifications section is cleaner for us, and our own thread lists aren't just filled with these foolish notification threads.

It was getting overwhelming at the gross amount of bots that register and post on here. Happy to see if cleaned up better.

Update (Version 1.5.5)

A tiny update for staff controls this morning. I realized spam users who are deleted don't yet have their private messages deleted. So I have updated the tool to do that, and updated the information the tool gives us staff members when a spam user is deleted.

As for future updates, they will still be coming, but still slowly as usual. Our new daughter is 7 months old and still not sleeping more than 1-2 hours at a time through the night, and is sick often. I've been sick for 7 weeks now. My wife is sick. I have emergency project on top of emergency project to finish with the home and cars. Everything is shitsville right now.

Update (not code related)

For some fucked up reason Trend Micro had the HTTPS version of this site marked as "Dangerous" and a "Scam" which must have come some 4 years ago when Google started marking the site as malicious and they just took Google's word for it? That is some fuck old-ass data they were running on. Hilariously enough, the non-SSL version of the site was marked "Safe".

This was preventing some people who use the Trend Micro anti-malware client and browser plugin from visiting the site.
Why anyone uses that kind of software is beyond me...

So I told Trend Micro to re-check the site and they are now marking it as "Safe" and in good standing.

Here's the URL I used to check our site and get them to figure their own shit out: Trend Micro Site Safety Center

Update (Version 1.5.6)

Another small update to the staff controls. When deleting a spammer, the tool never deleted threads they created. It actually almost never happens that a spammer creates a new thread.
Well, we had one this morning that did, so I updated the tool to delete their threads as long as they are empty (with no replies). It is much more difficult to deal with the situation if there are replies, so I kicked that can down the road.

Edit:
Update (Version 1.5.7)

It turns out there was a bug in my implementation above (things are a bit hard to test right now with spammers, since I'm being too lazy to create my own fake users to delete) which I believe I have fixed. While I was in there, I also implemented some additional counts that were just placeholders before.

Update (Version 1.5.8)

We've had an issue with long thread names and long thread sections in the thread summary view. If things were too long for the window, the thread summary list would get completely garbled.
I've applied a couple, crude mitigating fixes in the past, but the issue was still prevalent. I hadn't fixed it completely because there are two very tiny minor nagging issues with the common solution. However, this morning I've decided the fix with those tiny issues is much better than the way things are now.
Those tiny issues being:
1) A one-pixel tall line of a gap between summaries can show up sometimes, often under a sticky thread summary.
2) The too-long content can overflow and leave the containing box.

So I've done the work to get things displaying much better now.

Before:



After:

Update (Version 1.5.9)

This is a tiny security update. While working on the login functionality for a web site at work I realized we were not using a constant-time string comparison for our password hashes here.
Not a huge deal, but a very tiny security issue that I might as well address.
It took almost no time at all to fix. We are now protected against this extremely-difficult-to-leverage vulnerability.

Update (Version 1.5.10)

I made a new post using a CODE block and it opened my eyes as to how poorly those were visually formatted. I've updated the look for CODE blocks and it should be a big improvement. The main this was to get sane line heights, but I took the opportunity to really give it some flare.

Before:




After:

The underlying language version of the web site has been updated by the host and it seems to have caused the forum logo image to break. I'll need to look into that ASAP, probably Monday.