Project name: FluxBB

Project homepage: http://fluxbb.org/ | FluxBB GitHub

Assignment

I’ve been using FluxBB discussion forum system on my website since 2006. Back then the project was called punBB; however, years later a commercial company bought the project and some of the original contributors continued updating the system as a new open source project (FluxBB). Today the development of the commercial punBB is slow and the user base isn’t growing. On the other hand, FluxBB is getting better than ever before, its user base is constantly growing and the project has dozens of commits every week.

My biggest issue with punBB, later FluxBB, though, was spammers. I tried enabling various anti-spam features for stopping bots. The problem is that these days it’s often cheaper for spammers to hire „human bots“ that cannot be stopped by CAPTCHA techniques. These human bots often register to the forum, do not make any posts, they only fill out a URL in their profile under the „Website“ information to get backlinks for their sites. What I’d like to do is add an option to disable this „Website“ field entirely. Also, spammers often put links in their signatures. FluxBB lets you disable special markup code in signatures. Whenever you disable markup in signatures, this setting applies to all users. I would love to add an option to restrict this setting to certain user groups (e.g. administrators and moderators can use markup in signatures, others can’t).

My other contributions will include updated Czech locale files (the translated files are not keeping up with new features), small bugfixes and new documentation pages.

My slideshow: Download

Links documenting the results of my work

Presentation