Let's get this #&@**$!"£ forum fixed already

[Ari Rahikkala]

... just as soon as Her Majesty sees it fit to appoint me MiniInt (*taps foot*), the following tasks will begin to be handled in an undefined order:

- reduce forum page load times by moving the externalisable stuff (i.e. the huge gobs of JavaScript and CSS clutter) to external files and by configuring appropriate caching headers
- update the forum software to its latest version
- sanify the security of our shell account: With GregDean's approval and cooperation, change the password to something cryptographically *much* stronger than what it is now, for e.g. local use, and set up private key authentication for everyday maintenance over ssh
- automate the weekly forum database backups (I already took a backup by hand this Monday, it's a simple job to automate it)
- obscure the posting interface to foil spambots, the way I obscured the registration interface, so that we also stop getting anonymous spam
- remove the old spambot accounts that are still cluttering our userlist
- remove the junk in the database and on the website that GregDean left lying around when he was installing the board
- create an alternate style or two with a higher colour contrast than the default one
- if possible (not sure if I can do this one without complex trickery), make the forum's mailer use quoted-printable content-transfer-encoding instead of base64. I couldn't believe that there's still software in use that has problems with base64, but Hypatia's Mom plainly demonstrated... there is. Fortunately we can make life easier for it.
- suggestions?

[Ari Rahikkala]

Actually, scratch the one about removing junk useraccounts. Seems that's been handled pretty well by Hypatia's Mom and Conglacio.

[Ari Rahikkala]

Eight kilobytes of CSS gunk moved off, that's slightly under 10% of the size of the forum index page. The Javascript gunk seems to be pretty much localised to the post reply screen so it doesn't need to be externalised after all. Automatic weekly backups should be working, ask me about them next week to make that sure.

[Kaiseress Carol]

Thanks, Ari. Sorry for the delay.

[Gman Russell]

Ari, you rock. \m/

[Sander]

I'm not sure if you guys have access to the template files, but: http://nafticon.net/phpbb/viewtopic.php?t=1563

Also I want to thank Ari again for guiding me with the anti-spam mod thingy