Forums
The internet seems uniquely democratic, and the notion of using a website to provide a forum as a way of presenting information, and allowing for multiple authorship from the front end has a lot of attractive points.
Sadly however the human condition seems determined to make this a nightmare. My first foray into the area was very exciting and I quickly had 250 members of the forum, promoting all manner of things entirely irrelevant to the main aspirations of the site.
Even on this site I find the mere presence of a forum interface attracts as many as 150 failed attempted logins on a daily basis. As a result I am convinced that forum software needs a new level of security. I fail to see why there is such an interest in this kind of negative behavior. Clearly if there is a need to have forum software, we should implement some of this. Generally it means we need more secure passwords, and a limit to login attempts before we lock the address, and if it keeps going, then the lockout becomes permanent.
That having been said, there is a good place for forum software, and there is some good security options around, and I will no doubt venture into this area again. If you are running a genuine forum activity, then be aware that it normally takes a bit of management. In general you will want to manually approve new users, unless you really are interested in watches and viagra!
