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bitching programming Web 0.1 web 2.0

phpMyFAQ: don’t use it, part 2

Disappointing

No spam filter (there is one, allegedly, but it’s invisible, non-configurable (!), and missing obvious spam words)

(there are comments on the official forums from 3 years ago saying “we need some basic anti-spam tools” and the author replying with “we’re working on it”)

Annoying

No spam controls for reactive processing (banning users, marking comments as spam, etc).

Unforgivable

Each comment can ONLY be deleted one, by one, by one, requiring 6 mouse clicks per deletion!

The concept of a list of comments, and a checkbox next to each, and a “delete selected comments” is now well over 10 years old – and it only takes a few minutes to implement with PHP + SQL. If you ever find yourself making a web app for general usage, please don’t forget this core feature :).

(I’ve been too busy for the past month making actual iPhone apps to finish my free PHP FAQ platform, but watch this space, shouldn’t be too long now…)

5 replies on “phpMyFAQ: don’t use it, part 2”

PS: if you want to edit the spam filter, you need to:

1. Ssh to your server
2. go to the directory where your FAQ’s PHP files are located (e.g. /var/www/faq)
3. edit the file “inc/blockedwords.txt”
4. append extra words to the end of the file, one word per line

I don’t know if this will work, I only found this out by reading through the source code for what happens when you try to submit a comment (I couldn’t find any docs for this, nor any mention of the word “spam” anywhere in the source code).

I wonder if you took any notice to the results of the survey you did a while ago about which content readers wanted to see?

@Thorsten

Yep, but … this was with the captchas enabled (you do realise, don’t you, that captchas are VERY easy to defeat?) – and the problem is the lack of DELETE options, you know…

re: SSL cert – yep, my fault. I’m sorry.

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