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Winnipeg

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Posts posted by Winnipeg

  1. Yeap, looks like a new Bot Network...most of the IPs were from residential ISP's Dynamic IP ranges.  Comcast, Time Warner, Cox, some random server in Germany which is flagged as a SOCKS5 proxy.  Fun times.

     

    Unfortunately this means they might make a comeback as the infected home PCs get new IP Addresses, but the Usernames have been banned...

  2. Killed.  Banning the related IP Subnets....but there were 2 users and each used a total of 20+ networks, so we'll see how much of the world I have to ban.

     

    I suspect it's a new bot network as it all happened so quickly.


    And I've already got 4 hits from the bots trying to login now that I've banned their usernames....

     

    So if the site goes offline again you know why...

  3. I can do that if you wish ( I used to tie it to a census app that I built for the merit ages ago, but... ), but the reason I have not yet done that was you don't have any way to verify what people put in there short of having them PM you in game to verify.  Which is a long winded process, but if people want it I can add it.

  4. The Merit might have been based largely on the Senatus Populusque Romanus on the surface, we had a huge 1984 theme going on underneath.  The Administrative forums were called Airstrip One, and most of the ministries were named for the ministries in 1984.  The player I got along with the worst usually wore the title Goldstein....unlike here, the Merit never allowed users to set their own forum titles....

  5. The People's Republics of Winnipeg have disposed of this opiate of the masses.  While we cannot support other nations choosing to dose their populations with superstitions and ancient bogeymen, neither will we prevent you from doing so, just do not try to spread it within our borders.[/national leader hat]

     

    (Just to be clear, this is an "In character" response and in no way reflects the policies of this forum...[/admin hat])

  6. Yeap, I've seen a few forums like that...IPB, phpBB, VB, SimpleMachines, you name it, they've got a "working group" to hack it.  This is one of the reasons that you don't see the version number in the footer of IPB, or any major Forum Software anymore.

     

    Btw, I'll be sending you a link later this evening with some changes I've made...

  7. Yeah, not sure what draws them in to be honest....

     

    At work the school district website has a form for signing up for the district (and individual schools) newsletter, and the number of spam emails I get in there is rediculous, like they think it's some sort of commenting system.   The Feedback system was even worst, but I've since replaced it with a revamped version that has a spam filter in place...not one piece of spam since I enacted it.

  8. So I was looking at my stats in the Admin Panel....so far this year we've stopped nearly 7000 SPAMers from registering...and those are only the ones that made it by the built in spam controls from Invision... so how knows how many have actually been stopped.

     

    Anyway, here is a fun little info graphic for us to remember it by.

     

    It should be noted that December 2012 has 0 for it's numbers...so I think the Stop Forum SPAM plugin mashed Decemeber 2012 and Janruary 2013 together, I don't think we had a bumper crop of spam registrations in Jan...

    post-1-0-99515300-1378068533_thumb.png

  9. I never got into the Merit myself, though others asked me to at times.  But my recollection seems to mostly consist NPO and ADN players playing off each other in the Merit.  I didn't want to be a part of that.

     

    That was later...The Meritocracy pre-dated Invader/Defender politics...  But it did devolve to NPO vs ADN...

     

    The region was definitely more RP oriented...players role played as members of the government for their respective countries rather than as a single citizen of a region like you see in most Invader/Defender game play.  Made for a different sort of game play...we did have our own foray into Defending/Invading...we went to war with Atlantic in 2003...

     

    Anyway, I highly doubt it will ever get resurrected.

  10. Should be able to...it was set to 0 which disables the users ability to edit their own titles...I've never been a fan of letting users change their own title, but it's been a TWP tradition since I've been around.

     

    I've set it to a minimum of 5 posts and then you can edit your title, just FYI.

  11. I'd have to build it from the ground up...you might recall it never worked in the last version of the site...time is not something I've had alot of as of late.  I've been busy learning Coldfusion for work since the websites there that I have to support are all Coldfusion (for the record, not my choice! I'd switch them all to PHP in a heartbeat if I could).

     

    I'll see what I can do but no promises.

  12. I think one of the things that made the Meritocracy such a working Democracy for a long time was the fact we had someone (me...not to toot my own horn or anything, because I do not want the Delegacy, just using it as an example) who held the top in game seat (admittedly, it was a Founder not a WA slot) without imposing his will on the players in the region...well...until the whole pebble's "reboot" but that was because we were in an activity lull much like what we have now...

     

    Anyway, my point is, the only time Democracy really seem to do well in NationStates is when running the Government is left to the players of the region and the user holding the reins of the region (be that Founder, or WA Delegate) is leaving the region to run itself and just staying by to help should something happen like raiders trying to move in a remove the democratically elected government...hard to do and also hard to truely call it a Democracy as it's more of a Benevolent Dictatorship, but it's the closest you can come in NationStates without just role playing the hole thing and ignore the actual game....

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