Revsoft forums reaches 30000 posts and a record-high TI forum activity

[DJ Omnimaga]

As we have been recently more active scouting the TI community for programming-oriented news, we also have checked how active other forums were. It came to our conclusion that Omnimaga has become the most active TI forum avaliable on the Internet, followed by TI-BANK then further behind, United-TI.

This was of course, until we discovered something strange happening with RevSoft.

In the past year, due to certain events and due to general projects inactivity, overall forum activity seemed to have dropped and despite staff effort, it would still not rise signifiantly. Could it have taken a new Zelda update?

However, despite RevSoft inactivity, it seemed their server still experienced huge loads of traffic and slow downs. After further searches, it came to our attention that pretty much the entire interest towards the RevSoft community as we know it has shifted toward another RevSoft forum, which has reached 30000 posts this morning, 10000 more than the RevSoft forum we all knew. You can view it at the following link, but warning! Some content may not be suitable for minors!

http://jim.revsoft.org/forum/

In case for any reason, traffic, which still seems to increase as we write this, would cause the board to be unreachable, we did a screen capture of it so you see the statistics:



When other TI community people saw this, they couldn't believe their eyes.

-"Wow excellent work jim!" ~Buckeye on #seekanddestroy, EFnet

As we investigated, discoveries became more and more interesting.

-"This contains interesting rare Zelda screens and z80 assembly code." ~Galandros
-"i finally found a TI forum that is more active than Omnimaga" ~DJ Omnimaga

It seems that the key factoring news has definitively helped the TI community get more members who were formely not interested in calculators before. We still haven't figured out why users have prefered this "alternate dimension" RevSoft, though. Could someone have scared everyone away on the main forum? Could there have been a renewal of interest toward projects such as iGo, ColdFusion and SSP2? Has updates shifted there? Could it be the super rare things that can be found over http://jim.revsoft.org/ ? Maybe we will know, one day.

All we know now, though, is that everyone who thought that Omnimaga was now the most active TI calculator forum in monthly posting has been proven wrong. This graph speaks for itself:



Source: http://jim.revsoft.org/forum/index.php?action=stats

In October, this forum has reached a peak of 6502 posts in one month, which is 8 times higher than what Omnimaga got at the same time. Unfortunately, it seems that interest is slowly waning, as the post rate is dropping by over 1000 every month, but it is still more than twice higher than ours and it seems they are getting more and more members. Every day, this RevSoft forum gets an average of 35 new members. We do not even get this in one entire month!

Unfortunately, it seems that many of the posts have become less and less on-topic in the past year, but maybe this will be improved in the future with advancing technology and discoveries. Could the future of the TI community lies under this newly discovered community?

[mapar007]

We should get 'fake news' like ticalc, although this isn't really fake, just cynic...   :'( :'(

It is funny how they didn't rm -rf the whole thing though   (EDIT: after backing up the rare zelda screens, of course )

[Galandros]

The brown colour indicates fake news, right?

Funny quotes. I think Buckeye's one was the best of all, followed by close of DJ's.

[Madskillz]

Ha ha...jim still has that up huh. What can I say...have fun reading all the bots

[DJ Omnimaga]

The thing, though, is that I never thought I would see THAT MANY bots active on a forum before. That must be a record for sure!

We should get 'fake news' like ticalc, although this isn't really fake, just cynic...   :'( :'(

Actually we had them for 5 years. We just didn't post any since late 2008. Also Ticalc did some sarcastic ones too before, such as when calc.org redirected to a water gun website.

[Madskillz]

I had seen that a long time ago and I thought jim had removed it. But I bet that is why I get emails about some error from our hosting. I dont have access to the hosting anymore so I cant delete it. I guess Jim keeps it up so the bots can have a place to talk amongst themselves.

[DJ Omnimaga]

Well, until I found this, I was certain kevinJB was still in charge of the hosting. However, noticing Fable-2.com closed, I guess it's no longer the case. I guess it could be a good idea to remove it if you ever get slow downs due to it, though. If you still use the same host KevinJB used, I remember it was not very reliable (lots of times Revsoft was down when I tried to access it) so maybe too much traffic coulc cause problems.


That said, maybe not, considering how much traffic you got when Zelda made it to a game blog and the topic got half a million views or something.

And now I remember something: I think there was one instance where I seen more bots than this before, but it only lasted one day. It was on OCRemix forums, on December 26th 2005. They had about 2000 spambots spamming porn on the forums in one day.


About the forum, I think Jim was planning to move to SMF and create a custom skin but finally no more news about it. Only the main page got changed

[Galandros]

Deathsting requested on RS forums to close the subdomain...

[TIfanx1999]

It looks like some of the spam may be overflowing to the main board.

[DJ Omnimaga]

I wouldn't be surprised if what he said on the real RS forums might have been happening for much longer than  he thinks, because we had it happen on the old Omnimaga forums until we setup members so they cannot send PMs/Emails until they reach 5 posts. I know myself that when TIMGUL still ran on InvisionBoard 1.3, e-mail/contact info was public to guests and I got a lot of spam via e-mail.

As for now, I often get TIMGUL spam notifying me of "undelivered message returned to sender" because an admin uses a fake e-mail address so whenever a new member joins or someone sends him a PM, since TIMGUL boards sends notifications from [email protected], I get a notice saying an email failed to send.

The trick, though, is to simply add filters to your inbox so the spam lands in the spam folder.

[Silver Shadow]

I guess the RevSoft bot filter isn't very effective... lol

[DJ Omnimaga]

The SMF board had none enabled

The same thing would have happened to Omnimaga, if not worse, if we kept CAPTCHA disabled and didn't added a second spam filter system in October.

With these two protections turned on, now we only get like one bot every few day.

[Galandros]

WikiTI also had its spam... There were 1 to 3 per day during some months and were manually erased.
But many spam is still there to clean.

No bot has signed ever since the CAPTCHA was introduced.

[DJ Omnimaga]

I also remember viruses being embeeded in the page for a while. On UTI people warned to not browse the Wiki for a while until Mediawiki was updated

[Madskillz]

The bot filter that we have on our current forums is pretty effective. We rarely get spam posts/topics and members are removed within the day if they are deemed a bot. It seems I am still in admin there, maybe I'll try to a wipe and then update the smf with some bot preventions since I dont think I can get rid of it entirely.