The anonymity is kind of incidental - I assume most people would want to actually put there name or something. So to clarify: I don’t think there should be anonymity, I think it is a bad idea to exclude guests/lurkers. My second point was that if your Member profile email was to be included it should check whether you’ve made it public - though I could see that being more trouble.
Go to any news article on pretty much any site and they’ll have an “email this to a friend” link. They have a “required field” where you are supposed to put your return email address but there is no confirmation of it. I just emailed myself something from CNN, no membership or login required, and the return address came up as “test@hot.com” - totally made up.
Having the email / username posted within the sent message: This is actually extremely easy to change by Jerry or those who have access to the vB admin control panel. Like many of the standard phrases used by the forum, you can customize it however you wish.
All it means is going into the admincp and:
clicking on Languages & Phrases,
choosing Phrase Manager, and
editing the $vbphrase[sendtofriend] phrase. (If you can’t find it, just do a phrase search for “this is a message from”.) The part in question reads, by default:
Just remove the “mailto:$bbuserinfo)” part. Of course you could remove the username as well, but I think leaving that in is too important – otherwise there’s no way to identify who sent the message for the recipient.
(It’s possible to recode the form to include another option for “your name,” but that’s way more retooling than the SDMB would ever do.)
Allowing guests the use of sendmessage.php:
There’s much I disagree with about the SDMB’s choices when it comes to the technical aspects of its forum, but this one I gotsta give them points on.
If you allow the use of sendmessage.php to guests, you’re opening up the system to bots as well, and I promise you they will be more than pleased to send out virtual reams of automated spam using the SDMB’s resources and name recognition. The big boys, like CNN, can handle it because they’ve got the personnel and income to spend on shrugging off bots. Considering the Reader won’t even spend good money after good – i.e. upgrading the forum software from a less secure, less feature-filled version of vBulletin that’s nearly three years out of date – I assure you they’re not gonna throw good money after bad.
As far as this negative attention being unlikely to materialize, I disagree. My pissant little board, unpublicized and barely known, gets literally hundreds of bot visits an hour and dozens of (failed) attempts on sendmessage.php each day. A board that’s as big as the SDMB will attract far more interest. It’s really not worth it, I’m afraid.
Allowing the board to track who is referring threads and if the person(s) referred follow it up. The link to the thread in the email contains the referrer id. I don’t have any objection to that. But it doesn’t seem that that would produce a lot of data unless the link with the referrer is posted to someplace like Fark or Digg.
*The convenience of users who don’t realize browsers already have this capability. *It’s undeniable that some users want it. But what’s the overall demand for it?
Add the fact that the announcement for this feature displaced the more important one about subscription problems (which may have been isolated or already fixed).
Yes, I don’t need to use the feature. But it seems there wasn’t much need for it in the first place.
Actually choie, bots were precisely what I wasn’t thinking of when I said abuse wouldn’t materialize. Now that you bring it up I agree that it’s not worth the trouble that the bots would bring.
But according to TubaDiva, our ancient version of vB doesn’t have the option anyway so the point is moot. When I was checking big-boards.com to see what other large vBulletin forums were doing, I noticed how most seemed to be using version 3.6.x. I was going to jokingly say “Even a honda rsx fansite forum” but that place is actually hopping. 364 members and 175 guests at this time of night. I wonder what the Dope’s at right now…
Heh. One must never forget the bots, CarnalK! Never forget those creepy little pain in the ass bots. Luckily with an updated vBulletin there are several plugins that help prevent bots from registering (even CAPTCHA isn’t enough any more) or accessing various pages. Unfortunately, the plugin functionality wasn’t added until vB 3.5, so the SDMB’s old vBulletin version isn’t able to take advantage of the plugin system.
(Plugins are basically mini-scripts that one can easily install onto the forum software that add new functions but don’t change any of the standard vBulletin scripts. This makes upgrading/adding features a breeze, and best of all, they’re easy to remove as well.)
God, I’ve turned into a vBulletin shill. My forum recently won their official Board of the Month contest, so I suppose I’m feeling particularly well-disposed towards them.
I’m just impressed at anyone whose online members outnumber the bots/guests!
Funnily enough some much larger boards are still using vB 2.x.x. – SomethingAwful uses an incredibly old version of the software that they’ve tricked out, and they manage to handle waaaay more people online at once than that Honda RSX site. They’re a for-profit site, though, so it’s apples and oranges when compared to the good ol’ SDMB. I’d just like to see this place upgraded so everything’s secure and runs more smoothly. I’m sure Jerry keeps this version properly loaded with official security patches and all, but it’s almost always better to use up-to-date software. Someday, let’s hope!
I almost think you’re joking here, lol. We’ve got banner ads for guests, Google AdSense, subscription fees and this whole place is an adjunct to the Straight Dope articles with their associated books and merchandise. When other places get by on donations I think it’s safe to say the SDMB is at least attempting to be a for-profit site. Minus the “spend money to make money” bit though.
