I have finally open up RockForums.tk to the public, the deployment went OK, although I did have a few problems.  Email validation didn’t seem to work, in context with spambots, thank goodness as well, otherwise the forums would of been a complete mess, full of nonsense.  I wouldn’t want that.

How I dealt with the spambots, the first attempt was implementing reCAPTCHA, which didn’t work, the spambots OCR has advanced and will continue to do because some people are simply just motivated by greed and probably has no value for morality but that another story so let move on.

Advanced spambots uses random emails addresses, you probably would think it might be a problem, well trust me they are very easy to detect, why? because those email addresses are so random that almost none of them have a Gravatar.

Gravatar is an online service that a image (knowns as avatar) to one email or more email address, of course not many user have a Gravatar account,  Wordpress bloggers are very likely to have an Gravatar.

Yes I have use Gravatar as the second attempt to prevent, yep I’m actually using beyond it’s purpose.  Here a sample code, it’s very simple.

<?php
$email = "whatever@whatever.com";
$gravatar = 'http://www.gravatar.com/avatar/'.md5(strtolower(trim($email))).'?d=404'; // Note the 404 so it returns blank if there no avatar
$file = @file_get_contents($gravatar);
if($file == '') { // If $file compare to blank
echo 'Error: No Avatar';
} else {
echo 'Avatar found';
}
?>

What I did to the email address was trim it so there no white space, lower cased it and then converted to a md5 checksum and place it into a URL.  Get the contents of the url, run it through a if logic, if true then there no gravatar, therefore stopping the spambots from registering on rockforums.tk as most (if not, all) spambots don’t bother with gravatar.

I have took my time to fixed the email validation problem, I couldn’t get it to work with swiftmailer which came with the framework, so instead I used PHP mail() and it worked like a charm, the validation that came in the email worked with no problem.

Most of the pages on RockForums.tk have passed HTML5 validation, but there is one shortcode that produces img html code without the “alt” attribute, that shoudn’t be a problem I can fixed that very easily.

I have made good use of jQuery, I have not used it in a way that would impair bookmarking or any other critical features of any web browser, it just there to enhance the user experience especially on registration (mostly data validation) and posting new topics.  Enhancing user experience is the general idea of JavaScript, jQuery is just library, a very good one as well, it’s make JavaScript hell of a lot easier.

On the storyboard there was a tag cloud, but trying implement that feature was very frustration and eventually started getting very counter-productive, the main problem was trying to write a SQL query, I just couldn’t get it to count the related records between tag and tag-topic table, maybe it was just a bug with the current version of MySQL, I don’t know.  I did say it was getting counter-productive, so it not wise to dwell on it, so let move on.

I have added a few moderation and admin options, such as the ability to edit and promote members and to ban certain tags.

Anyway the forum is in public and this probably won’t be the last evaluation, the link to the forum is below.

http://rockforums.tk

I will think about how I can improve the software.  Anyway I prefer Symfony over CakePHP anyday, anywhere.