BikeGremlin
Member
After years of weighing pros and cons, I've decided to do it, and published my forum on bikegremlin.net domain.
A fresh install, and a brand new forum.
I suck at visual design. Thankfully, XenForo's default settings align with "my brand" pretty well, so I just made sure not to ruin it.
What I did concentrate on was security, spam prevention, and "technical customizations."
Here is where I took notes of most stuff I fiddled with (will try to keep that up-to-date with any new changes):
https://io.bikegremlin.com/32015/xenforo-forum-installation-securing-and-configuring/
Notably:
Left to do:
Any suggestions, especially corrections, are more than welcome.
Boring details:
I started in the BBS days, over Usenet, and forums, as user, moderator, and administrator.
After having seen a lot, and tried different software, my conclusion is that XenForo isthe best the least bad (I'm a pessimist 
) forum software.
The basic idea of the forum is to consolidate questions, comments & replies on various different platforms (in more detail about why I made the forum).
We'll see if I end up regretting that decision (so far so good). So far, it's been a lot of work to set it all up, but hopefully it will be more help than hassle in the long run (though I'm not sure - as the title of this post shows
).
Relja
A fresh install, and a brand new forum.
I suck at visual design. Thankfully, XenForo's default settings align with "my brand" pretty well, so I just made sure not to ruin it.
What I did concentrate on was security, spam prevention, and "technical customizations."
Here is where I took notes of most stuff I fiddled with (will try to keep that up-to-date with any new changes):
https://io.bikegremlin.com/32015/xenforo-forum-installation-securing-and-configuring/
Notably:
- Setting up Cloudflare Turnstile anti spam.
- Gmail and GitHub account registration (Microsoft sucks, and Linkedin integration seems to be broken).
- Configuring the footer copyright to automatically show the current year.
- Adding Google Programmable Search to the forum's advanced search.
- Adding a mod/admin only visible menu item, that lists the users with unconfirmed emails, sorted by the registration date.
Left to do:
- Some kind of caching (LiteSpeed or Redis - we'll see).
- Configure Amazon SES or similar mass-mailing service.
Any suggestions, especially corrections, are more than welcome.
Boring details:
I started in the BBS days, over Usenet, and forums, as user, moderator, and administrator.
After having seen a lot, and tried different software, my conclusion is that XenForo is
) forum software.The basic idea of the forum is to consolidate questions, comments & replies on various different platforms (in more detail about why I made the forum).
We'll see if I end up regretting that decision (so far so good). So far, it's been a lot of work to set it all up, but hopefully it will be more help than hassle in the long run (though I'm not sure - as the title of this post shows
).Relja
