New Vagabond Journey Travel Forum

There is a new travel forum on Vagabond Journey.com at Travel Help Forum

There was an attack at Vagabond Journey.com. An attack that we eventually buckled under the weight of.

One of Chaya’s first major suggestions for Vagabond Journey.com — besides promptly letting me know everything on the site that looked stupid — was that it should have a travel forum: a place where the site readers could interact with each other and ask questions of the entire community rather than just interacting with me all the time.

It made sense. I don’t want to interact with me all the time, why should you? The forum is an opportunity for readers to communicate directly with each other on a variety of travel topics.

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Wade from www.VagabondJourney.com
Western New York, USA, December 21, 2009
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So we put up a travel forum using phpBB technology. I put a lot of time into its design and figured out the pretty heavy code. And just when I got everything set up and ready to go, the automated spam began coming in.

Tons of it.

It was too much to handle.

So I set the administrative options to allow me to moderate posts and topics before allowing them to be published. I thought that this would work. I thought wrong.

I quickly found my moderation queue full of hundreds of posts daily — to go through them all and moderate every one eventually took me up to an hour each day. Way too long.

So I set the administrative options to allow me to screen members and allow only members to post topics. I thought this would work. I thought wrong.

Suddenly, I became flooded with tons of membership requests — many of the usernames were actually handles that I could imagine a real person using. I could not tell who was a robot, who was a spammer, and who wanted to contribute information to my pages. So I struggled with this, found that 99% of the people wanting to post were spammers, discovered Russian language posts that I could not delete — bugged code or something — and I called it quits.

I lost the forum battle. I packed in the phpBB forum and removed most of the links going to it. Oh well, Vagabond Journey.com would not have a forum.

But the drive to receive user submitted content in strong in the internet world, and as I found the Travel Help questions pouring in at a way faster rate than what I could answer them, I began thinking about a forum again. Couldn’t I find a forum making program that would be able to properly fight off spammers — I know that they are out there.

So I found one. Simple: Press Forums offers a forum system that works with Word Press, the system that I use to publish this website. I uploaded the forum last night, and began filling in the catagories. I looked into the system and how it prohibits spam, and it seems to work.

It works well.

And it looks good.

Visit the Travel Help Forum

Vagabond Journey.com has a travel forum again. Readers can now ask each other questions and receive answers. This is good. There is a relatively large number of very intelligent people who read this travelogue, I would like to ask many of them questions. So here is my chance.

Travel Forum Organization

The Vagabond Journey travel forum is divided up into four main sections:

1. Community – A place for readers to introduce themselves, find updates on Vagabond Journey.com, and to offer suggestions for the improvement of the site.
2. Travel How To, Tips, Work Abroad, Travel Lifestyle – Practical information on traveling and how to travel.
3. Travel Planning – This is a collection of forums where people can receive help planning their travels.
4. Global Culture and Current Events – Digressions on culture, warnings, tips, and what is going on in the world.

Hopefully, this travel forum will take off a little better than the last one.

If anybody is interested in a half day of work or so, I would be willing to hire a few people to get this forum going.

Thanks,

Wade

Visit the Travel Help Forum

Read more about developments on Vagabond Journey.com
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