Oakland Park Baseball

Scott suggested taking yet another step in our increasingly secure state of affairs on this message board, and I thought I would put the question to everyone.

Should I set up the board so that no one other than registered users can view the board or see that the forums exist? They could still come to the page and sign up, but they wouldn't be able to read any of the messages or see what the board is like.

There is another option -- I could make it so that they can see the names of the forums ("General Discussion," "Shit-Talking," etc.) but not read any of the messages. That would be weird, though.

Thoughts?

i think it's important that new players / potential new users be able to see the activity in the forums...

is there a problem with people reading what we're writing? It seems as long as spammers aren't free to post it isn't an issue.

Ken, I agree.

I think this may have come up because Scott and I both noticed yesterday there were guests floating around on the forums. I speculate that they were spambots that were thwarted by my anti-poker-casino-147 measures. But, big deal. I have plenty of bandwidth available.

I think sometimes, WE are the guests...sometimes I sneak over to the site w/o logging in. Limiting the posts to registered members wouldn't stop anything- they could just registerand "look legit".

I would be worried about Parks and Rec. I worked in the SF Gov, and know that Cities don't like challanges to their programs so they look for the habits of others, and our squatting deal is problematic.

TheLegend wrote:i think it's important that new players / potential new users be able to see the activity in the forums...

is there a problem with people reading what we're writing? It seems as long as spammers aren't free to post it isn't an issue.

I'd like for new people to see the activity, but I'm concerned about discussing our illegal squatting techniques out in the open. We could easily be held accountable... all Oak's Parks and Recs would have to do is simply go to this forum, type in "defremery" (or whatever) into the search engine, then, lo and behold, our squatting would be revealed.

This is why I am encouraging others to vote to keep the forum private. And getting rid of the spambots would be a nice benefit as well. I am pissed at the fact our "most users online" has been faked the last few days because of the spam bots.

I am registered so I really don't care, except to say, if "Baseball=Life" thinks we should go dark then hey maybe we should.

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I agree: its scott's call.

then again, our website is for all to see as well.

Peter, with all due respect to Scott, it's partly my decision as well, since I'm administering this forum and paying for the webspace that it's hosted on. And, I believe, all of us who participate, which is why I put it up as a poll.

"Keep the forum private?" You mean "change it to make it private."

Anthony, people can attempt to register, but now they can't post until I approve the account. So, effectively, there's no way to spam the board.

Can we drop this sticky too?

No.

(Okay, maybe later.)