Roots Archives Forum

dear friends,

as some of you may know it, we have been working hard this week to get rid of our old forum engine (phorum) and move to a modern engine which will include moderating tools, new features etc ....

our choice has been to move to the phpbb3 engine. the main reason of this choice (which sounds sometimes weird to me as phpbb had a pretty bad reputation a few years ago) is our ability to keep the old threads of this forum and reinject them in the new forum.

if everything goes well (and i think it will) we should be able to launch the new forum .... today ! i told you we are working hard.

some old features will disappear and new ones will be online from scratch. please be patient with us as this is all new, we all will have to get used to the new engine.

but we trust that, in the end, everyone will be pleased with the new forum, and more than anything, we will have a better protection against spammers (it appears that most of the spams here came from real humen, not bots).

please note that your private messages will NOT be transfered. we're sorry for that, but there's no choice unless we spend days and days trying to understand the coding of phpbb, and we don't have time for that. lots more important things to do for RA and getting it back on track.

of course, we'll allow you to access your old pm box next weeks so that you don't lose everything.

this forum will probably be closed some time today for a few hours, while we move to the new engine.

thanks for your comprehension

and may jah be with us !

Looking good, looking good!

Looking good so far . Hopefully all will run well (tu)

Hello friends,

we're proud to welcome all of you in our new board.

let's hope we'll all find here a nice place to stay, share ideas, opinions, learn, etc.... always reggae oriented of course (you'll notice there's no off topic room anymore for now).

this is day 1 of our new engine. some mistakes have probably been made, lots of stuff to improve, please feel free to share here your impressions, regrets, wishes, corrections ...

i'll try to summarize quickly the biggest changes :

- you can now send attachments to your message. only pictures are allowed for now, we have to discuss later if other files should be approved
- old html links, internal covers etc.... don't work anymore. we'll see later if there's a need to restore them on old threads but it will be a lot of work.you can still post html links in your new messages, it will be automatically a clickable link as long as you put http:// or www. in front of the address
- you can add avatars to your account and other new features please check your control panel for more
- old private messages are lost in your new account. please go to this address to consult them : http://www.roots-archives.com/old_forum/
- up to date moderating tools

please take a look at your user control panel as soon as possible. there are a lot of options in there.

i'll have special thanks to ron and hans for their patience and their wonderful work in here to maintain this board, and thanks to mat for making this new update possible. and a big thank to all of you who are here but also to some of our greatest contributors who have left, i'm sure some of you will come back one day or another.

now this is just the first step inside a greater plan for the future of RA but we'll talk about it later.

for now let's have fun

Looks good to me, so far...

It might be an idea to disable images in signatures and animated gifs anywhere on the forum. If you haven't done so already.

Speaking from my experience on other forums, people do seem to go OTT with these, to the annoyance of everyone else, if given the opportunity...

we still need lots of testing but it should be already disabled

Funky Punk wrote: Looks good to me, so far...

It might be an idea to disable images in signatures and animated gifs anywhere on the forum. If you haven't done so already.
Speaking from my experience on other forums, people do seem to go OTT with these, to the annoyance of everyone else, if given the opportunity...

Wow, despite all your hard work, it took less than 10 hours for spammers to start posting here again... (

I like the new look!!! Good work.

Mick Sleeper wrote: Wow, despite all your hard work, it took less than 10 hours for spammers to start posting here again... (

yes it's kind of .... upsetting ?

well i'm not that surprised as the spammers are humen, not bot ... whatever the protection will be, they will manage to register

i think we'll have to change the rules in here so that new members can't post until approval

the good news is : now we can make it

seb wrote: yes it's kind of .... upsetting ?

well i'm not that surprised as the spammers are humen, not bot ... whatever the protection will be, they will manage to register

i think we'll have to change the rules in here so that new members can't post until approval

the good news is : now we can make it

Is there a way to prevent users from posting external URLs until they've made a certain number of posts? That might be a good way of reducing the incentive to spam the forums...

Though I suppose that they could start being all

"w w w DOT spam DOT com"