The Framers Forum

John (EstLite),

Please explain why when I went to update my profile and make it more complete, it now generates two Location lines... some posters have only one, others have creatively used two?

Glitch or what?

John

In the old forum software, PHPbb 2.x, there was no facility to make fields, such as Location, required. Initially members could register with just a name and password, revealing nothing of themselves.

In order to prevent spammers and other evil doers from registering, I thought that new registrants should be required to give some indication that they are connected with framing in some way, so I modified the code so that registration could not proceed if certain boxes were left blank.

When the forum software was upgraded a while back, I found that the facility for making certain fields mandatory at registration time was now built in, but implemented in a slightly different way from my original modification. Unable to devote the time to seamlessly graft the old forum database with the new, and not wanting to force all of our members to re-register, I took the shortcut of allowing both Location fields to remain.

Members who were registered under the old forum software, and who have never altered their profile, will have the single Location. However, when modifying your profile you now have to fill in the new Location box as it is a required field.

Incidentally, in recent weeks bots have been developed that can decipher the forum's CAPTCHA (for Completely Automated Turing Test To Tell Computers and Humans Apart). So an additional required field (1019) is now in place which is working to prevent bogus registrations.