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VoyForums Announcement: Programming and providing support for this service has been a labor of love since 1997. We are one of the few services online who values our users' privacy, and have never sold your information. We have even fought hard to defend your privacy in legal cases; however, we've done it with almost no financial support -- paying out of pocket to continue providing the service. Due to the issues imposed on us by advertisers, we also stopped hosting most ads on the forums many years ago. We hope you appreciate our efforts.

Show your support by donating any amount. (Note: We are still technically a for-profit company, so your contribution is not tax-deductible.) PayPal Acct: Feedback:

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VoyForums Site Development Changelog

Mon Aug 21 16:02:57 PDT 2006: IP-search fixed for admins.
Tue Jul 11 05:10:36 PDT 2006: Many significant features in the new version!
1. Spam Reports
  Take advantage of our new Spam submission feature. View messages in the Owner Login -> Message Manager and submit spam messages for our review!
2. New Spam and security measures:
  1. Scripts and HTML blocking: Posts containing any scripts, objects, embed tags, and some other HTML features. are now blocked. (You can see it in action by trying to post a message containing "<script>" in any forum.) A bit ago we switched to preventing such posts from being posted at all -- for security; but now the author of the post is given the option to edit and resubmit their post.
  2. The "HTML only for VoyUsers" option: See the option "HTML for VoyUsers" above.
  3. Message duplication prevention: Visitors can't post repeated messages. This at a minor convenience to a few people who might want to test things out by repeating a post, but reduces on irritating people flooding boards.
  4. Filters + Word-ranking system: Spam prevention and configurable profanity filters. The skeleton code is now in place and preliminary ratings (rankings) of posts is now done. This first version of our filtration system will allow us to study the content and establish ratings to block spammers.
3. IP Search added to Message Manager
4. A couple new emoticons:
5. Expressions: Settable in the Display Options section.
6. Admin IP search Admins can now search for IPs in the Message Manager area.
7. Email address protection: Authors email addresses are now "hidden" behind a form, reducing on the likelihood of people using software to automatically gather email addresses. * This is new, as of Wednesday, Nov 30 -- testing would be useful! *
8. HTML for VoyUsers: We added an option to prevent anyone but logged-in VoyUsers from posting HTML. This is at your discretion. Some admins are using it because they want to post HTML, but don't want visitors to be able to post HTML. Anyone not logged in as a VoyUser can still post, but any HTML contained in their message will display in a forum as actual code -- this code is therefore "safe" and does not affect you or other visitors.
9. Assistant Moderators: Add a registered VoyUser to be an assistant admin of your forum! Control what access they have with keys. Registered VoyUsers do not need to know your forum's password, but you add their VoyUser name in your own Forum Owner login to give them access.
10. Last-archive-count bug fixed: Not actually a bug, but nevertheless, when a post is made the "last archive #" in a forum is updated and the forum settings saved. This was made more efficient by saving the changes only when the last archive # actually differs, itself, improving system performance a bit.
11. More technical changes: These have a huge impact on VoyForums operation...
  1. Data Locking Mechanism: This is very very important, but hopefully will not be noticable to you, except it improves the quality of VoyForums and its operation. All locking (configs, message databases, cached message index, forum accounting log and notes) is handled using a unified clean lock file and fcntl() locking of individual bytes.
  2. Forum config data stored in a unified database instead of individual DBs: Bottom of forum presently shows if the config is coming from the DB server (it should be on in any forum you hit -- for its config will be loaded from the server, except the first hit or if you change the forum config file on disk). As of placing this version online, this was taken back out as a safety precaution until we complete some work on it.