Looking for someone to work with me on a slightly bigger 'hack'

[HuangA]

As TVB, ManagerJosh and myself have some what chatted about in this thread, I am going to get started on working on a hack that'd do something ManagerJosh have suggested. For those that doesn't want to read, basically, I want to create a hack that'd allow administrators to report IP addresses and email addresses of spammers to a centralized database, and also allow administrators to 'patch' their forums by downloading a list of IP addresses and email addresses of spammers and automatically add to their banned list.

Conceptually speaking, this isn't too complicated, all we need is some basic php coding and dedicated group of people to check that none of the reported IP addresses are dialup address and or public access point address (so people don't ban random innocent people from their sites), as well as some means to evaluate whether or not an email address claimed is bogus (IE: "I hate my next seat neighbour because he won't let me copy his final exam, so I submit his email address to the database to make him suffer" type of submission). I can temporarly provide hosting (on a shared hosting server) for the database, as well as take lead in the coding process. If anyone is interested to join in and help contribute (IE: code, suggestions etc.), I'm open for all sorts of comment.

The outcome of this will result in a coauthored hack that we'll post here on vb.org and allow license holders to download and 'patch' their banned list. If Jelsoft can provide a mean to allow our backend to check for license validness, please let me know as well so I can incorporate that to hammer the unlicensed people

Cheers!

[eva01_]

make sure it works on safari and it doesn't mess up the IP banning for administrators using safari

because that would be one hell of a SNAFU :P

[HuangA]

Originally Posted by eva01_

make sure it works on safari and it doesn't mess up the IP banning for administrators using safari

because that would be one hell of a SNAFU :P

Does IP banning currently not work for Safari? I am not sure what you mean because this would be quite indepandant from the current vB system. In fact, I think you'll only be modifying one file (the admin cp menu), and uploading a few custom coded files which will directly interact with the records of your database which bans the user(s). I will probably start a few support tickets to harass Jelsoft people about the cache stuff if there's any cache going on.

Thanks for the quick input though

[eva01_]

IP banning does work in safari, i just pointing out, that there are browsers other than IE and FF out there that people use and OMFG people use something other than windows :P but 95% of people don't care and they release things that end up not working for Mac anyways and then say "oh it doesn't work for Mac, oops my bad" ala Fidelity in Quicken last week kinda shut themselves off some how and didn't know it and said "we did, oh, sorry, we will fix that sometime"

so just make sure it works with Mac, and not just windows. I run web design and i am working with an anime news client right now that our sole purpose is fixing their site to work on Safari.

[HuangA]

Originally Posted by eva01_

IP banning does work in safari, i just pointing out, that there are browsers other than IE and FF out there that people use and OMFG people use something other than windows :P but 95% of people don't care and they release things that end up not working for Mac anyways and then say "oh it doesn't work for Mac, oops my bad" ala Fidelity in Quicken last week kinda shut themselves off some how and didn't know it and said "we did, oh, sorry, we will fix that sometime"

so just make sure it works with Mac, and not just windows. I run web design and i am working with an anime news client right now that our sole purpose is fixing their site to work on Safari.

Sorry about the late reply; I've been stuck on campus for a bit... Anyways; I don't think there will be any major problems with this. As long as we have compatability with text areas, it'll work fine. After all, we are not making a whole new site from scratch, just add-on's for the admin cp. In all cases, I'm going to get started on the backend database for now... maybe I'll need you to further help me refine the looks later

Thanks for your active inputs!

[TruthElixirX]

Our much space and bandwidth will be consumed? For the database?

[HuangA]

Generally speaking, I don't think it will be too big of a major concern space wise; after all, you can only ban so many people from a forum... Bandwidth for each forum admin would probably not be too much, perhaps at maximum of maybe 100 to 200K per section (IP and email) for each complete update. Perodical updates (IE: you've updated yesterday, and updating again tomorrow) maybe will just be a few kb's.

However, the server end / unified database would be slightly more troublesom. Disk space again wouldn't be a major deal; but depending on the popularity of the hack it may vary -- and I would like to think that if we pull this off, there may be quite a bit of admins that'd be interested in this. I'd say this wouldn't exceed much than a few GB a month though.

A problem I am foreseeing right now is that there is no such thing as 'cache' for something like this. And if the dump (list of IP/email address) is generated each time it is requested, it may be slightly heavier on the server. I currently have one idea in mind where the server end would utilize cron to curl the dump script and create a set of 'packages' for forum admins (to be more precise, our hack). Then that way they can get say daily digest or what not, and it'd be a static HTML based on the date the package is released. However, this becomes an issue where email spammers can grab list of email dump from this system directly and then privacy issues start to jump out... This is also why I am currently back on the drawing board and considering about email feeds and what not... In all cases, I am fairly clear on the IP part already, I think... If there are enough interest and we get everyone to pool in ideas etc. it'd be great help for sure.

Back to the drawing board