Create A Forum - Support Forums

It's ok I fixed the problem by switching from WYSIWYG editor to SC editor and everything is fine now.

Sounds like you have too much on your plate, but most times it's better to be busy than bored. One day you will leave it behind to venture into your retired life, and from experience, will not miss it as much as you thought you might. I'm 69, and figuring out how to use tools like Create-a-Forum just now, never thought I'd be involved in public causes or webpage management after a career in private sector engineering.

If you decide to make this time factor exception, I would actually code it in as a selectable "feature" in your Forum setup library. And just as a thought, if the Forum User world is shrinking I'd be asking why, and what can be done to reverse that course. I think you will find that one reason is that Forum setup is "challenging" at best, it was a bit much for two old guys to figure out. We managed but what's needed is a "tool" to assist your users... let's call it the Forum Wizard.

And that is a new product to this arena, so be sure to have a "one-time" fee to use it... could be simple enough to do. Basically it's just a way to collect information from the user, to pre-load as much of setup requirements as possible, to get them 80% on the way to a useful Forum. Best example I can direct you to, Turbo Tax products do this very well, filling the blanks of the US Federal Tax Forms.

If you get a chance, here's the Forum address - https://ecna.createaforum.com/index.php

Wait, if that's true then CAF needs to change their model, it seems like following the Federal Government business methodology isn't working. It would make Create-a-Forum one of the few "businesses" that currently operates under the "run at a loss" business model, in a country that prides itself on Capitalism first, Community & Social Responsibility are a distant second & third. 

I'll make some changes to hopefully add a few more pennies per day to the coffers, if that helps. Again, thank you for providing the information and for the work you do to make this all happen on Create-a-Forum. Great support, very responsive, take care.

Create-a-Forum in general is making money... wasn't talking about individual forum admins that run a given Forum. I'm not sure how anyone makes money on this tool, it's more for collecting posts & the discussion of topics that interest a certain group of people. In our case, a safety issue with the Erie Canal

I can understand how having dozens of "extra pages" to display user IPs, Time, and Forum page names might affect overall performance but that information would still exist regardless of whether it can be displayed, isn't that correct? If the performance issue is a result of more data being held for "possible" display & use, that's something to consider. Of course that data is also being cleared away as fast as it's being collected with every tick of the clock.

We found this was a tool to help weed out bots, and such. After we blocked Alibaba for three days they gave up, same with Russian IPs that were frequenting our Forum, and let's not forget Amazon, Facebook, and other users who spent most of their time reporting posts to moderators because they didn't like content. We were able to BAN those IP ranges and eventually got back to seeing users coming to the Forum for the content of the material and topics e covered.

If taking away some Admin capability is the answer, then that's it, story over... just seems like it's a move that's headed in the wrong direction, unless people in charge want the bots to win, by handcuffing admins who know how to deal with them.

Thank you for your reply & help.

Please explain just a little bit more, as i can't seem to make sense of how this DISPLAY setting would affect performance of a given Forum.

This is a setup value for a time period and is purely for "display" purposes, it only shows the number of members & guests who visit a site in an admin adjustable time frame. It could be hourly if set to 60, or a 15 minute window as the default is set to, or an entire day, which is 1440 minutes. Since the Description of that says its DAILY, the default should be 1440 (24 x 60 for those who are math challenged)

By setting this value NOTHING is changed that would affect performance, only a display count for the number of times the forum was visited, much like a webpage counter does. It DOES create more admin pages to view if that count is higher, but for the admin only.

How does a displayed value of Forum traffic affect performance of that Forum?

Seems like that depends on how many users are hitting the website.

What it does allow... it is offering the admin the capability to see if their Forum is being attacked by "miscreants" like Alibaba, and other "cloud" users who simply want to "add" information to anyone's Forum to sell their products, or provide a link to another webpage.

And our Forum was attacked 14743 times in one day by Alibaba, until I blocked their IP range.

You are taking away a valuable tool for your Forum Admins, but maybe that's because Create-a-Forum management prefers to let advertisers run unchecked on their customers forums,  gotta pay the bills I guess. Sorry but the reply to this original question seems like it makes zero sense, can you please expound on your reply, and state exactly how "performance" is affected here?

Look at the image, do you see the issue with nomenclature?  

Most "online today" is NOT correct with this 60 minute limit, and now the ability to monitor for spam traffic is gone. If Create-a-Forum believes that's a good thing I'm a little suspect...