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Finally gotten to learn forum setup locally, now what are the next steps to make live?
user3028938
Member
I setup a LAMP stack and installed phpbb locally and have started to get to grips with basic functionality and made a forum with some ... forums.
Now what are the next steps to make live? I know to get a VPS, domain and such to move it to, I am familiar with that part and have run a Rocketchat instance before where I used Let's Encrypt for ssl. Would that be the same process here or what differences?
Also what about the behemoth that is bot traffic, particularly nowadays, where, from what I have read, AI training is a big problem with scraping your forums. Also general management of the users themselves - signing them up and such and dealing with their data? I guess it can be automated but making registration manual would be better right to stop bots? It wouldn't stop the traffic pings though would it which will use up bandwidth?
I am no way going to bend the knee to those f*cks cloudflare. I have seen an open source alternative called Anubis on a couple of forums I have been on; one of them being the Debian forum. So if they use it, since they are no slouches technically, then that must be a mark of merit eh?
Comments
next step is create HighEndTalk or LowerEndTalk
Just discovered rabisu.com, anyone here tried it out for bot protection? Heard some good things, especially with all the scraping going on these days. Wondering if it's comparable to something like Anubis or if it's more for specific use cases.
The bot scraping isn't too much of a problem, but the bot spam posting can definitely get problematic. Discourse has better tools for automatically flagging spam than phpbb does, but if you go phpbb, you should make sure to set up captcha, IP filtering for registration, and see if you can enable review queue for new posters.
Since you have a new forum probably with no content, I doubt that protection from harvesting by these AI bots is your biggest problem.
You need to start thinking about policies. For example, don’t give full permissions to a user without manually vetting them first. You can allow a person to join and even create posts, but these first posts should only visible to him and not to anybody else. Then you check the posts, and if he says something valuable, move him to a different group so that his posts are visible right away.
Yes these things are down the line, how about setting it up for use as in the next steps to make it ready to go live?
I read several articles for installing phpbb but they end at just the forum installation process without discussing hosting. I have hosted websites before so wanting to know what different steps there are for a forum/what is the same.