Obviously, things look a bit different here than they used to! I just completed a major update of the software that runs behind this blog (I haven’t done this for something like a year, so it was pretty overdue). In the process, the way that Jawlz.com used to ‘look’ was temporarily lost. So, for the time being (possibly permanently, depending on how people like the new look of the site), this is how jawlz.com is going to be looking. I’m going to see if I can cut down on the number of months shown on the ‘archive’ section of the sidebar, as that looks overly long and cluttered to me.
In any case, the big update means 2 major things:
1) Less Spam. The spam blockers I’d been using had caught over 18,000 spam posts to the website and the minichat since I installed them, but more and more spam has been getting through lately. The spam blockers have now been updated to newer versions should be more effective.
This should *also* be the case for the minichat – I now have the ability to ban ip addresses from posting in the chatbox. Depending on how many or how few ip addresses are sending the spam, this could prove to be a complete, be-all and end-all solution to the spam problem there. This will probably be a 2-3 week process, however, as I’ll be adding the spammers’ ip addresses to the ‘blocked’ list when they do get spam through.
2) A brand new Jawlz.com forum system. This one is more similar to the original Jawlz.com forums in the way it looks, but it is built into the actual blog itself, so you won’t need separate sets of user names and passwords. One works for all. The new forums are MUCH, MUCH more functional than the stopgap ‘integrated’ forums that have been pretty much unused since I replaced the original forums with them.
To get to them, click on the “Jawlz.com Forums” link at the top of the page.
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And…. that’s it for now. Feel free to let me know what you think!
