Science Fiction Forums add new features
We have finally completed — just in time for SF-Fandom’s 10th birthday on March 6 — a long drawn-out upgrade process to our Web forums. Battles with Web forum spammers, transitions between hosting services, changes in moderation staff, and our entry into social media have all played a role in how SF-Fandom has evolved through the past couple of years. Unfortunately, so many distractions led to our falling behind on updating the forums. We were stuck at VBulletin 3.5.4 for the longest time, and the versions outgrew us. We eventually had to import our own database into VBulletin 4.0 because the upgrade process stopped working.
Among the changes we have had to implement is taking a hard stance against automated registrations. We have blocked many top-level domains, many proxy server IP addresses, and a lot of free email providers (including Gmail, Hotmail, and Yahoo!). We still accept accounts using those free mail services when people contact us.
The upgrade process also forced us to abandon the old templates that Dixie had spent many hours creating for SF-Fandom. The templates were not compatible with the latest versions of VBulletin software and there was no way to reuse the images. We have heard some complaints about the new look but that will have to remain in place for the foreseeable future.
Because we can now offer many other features to our members we have divided Registered Users into two groups. Those members who have made at least 10 posts are now in the Contributors group and they may start their own SF-Fandom blogs and/or image galleries. There is no charge for the blogs or galleries and the latest posts and comments will be featured on the new dashboard or “home” page.
That is another big change for the forums. The old address of https://old-blog.sf-fandom.com/vbulletin/ has now been taken over by the VBulletin community dashboard. The forum root URL is now https://old-blog.sf-fandom.com/vbulletin/forum.php.
You will be able to find member blogs at https://old-blog.sf-fandom.com/vbulletin/blog.php. Some moderation policies will be enforced. We won’t allow pornography or links to pornography. Nor will we allow the promotion of illegal file download networks. Such blogs will be removed (and member accounts suspended) if we find these violations.
If you are active on Facebook, the SF-Fandom forums now allow you to use Facebook Connect to integrate your SF-Fandom and Facebook accounts. You can also “LIKE” us for your friends on Facebook (and we hope you do from time to time).
We also continue to experiment with RSS feeds, using them to post links to interesting science fiction and fantasy-related news from around the Web.
We do hope you’ll join us and be part of the next 10 years of great SF-Fandom discussions!