Let's get this #&@**$!"£ forum fixed already
Posted: Sat Aug 26, 2006 2:30 pm
... 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?
- 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?
