I did a little bit of work on my Affiliate tips forum Affearners today to give the theme a bit of work.

I dont know if your like me but I am starting to think that most of the forums I go to all look a little confusing and loud. I have toyed with the idea of taking the whole thing over to a forum like Beast but I am not happy that its good enough from a features perspective yet.

So in the meantime I have stripped out most of the colour and made the whole thing look more minamalist. Let me know what you think.

Next on the agenda we will be adding a way to see the ‘Best of Affearners’ and ill post the code I wrote for that. Then soon after we will be adding some conditional stuff to try to increase signups from guest users.

Many people who have met me will testify to the fact that I could do with losing a few pounds (I expect that MickG, PaulH, DaveN, Pilky, Esrun, TheKaptain and VSloathe and many others will all now be reading the rest of this with a smile and some enthusiasm at the thought of more ammo for taking the piss, I give as good as I get though! – Im not linking you lot as youll have to find this yourselves )

So in the past month or so I have taken on the task of running to get rid of some of that excess baggage. I started last month at the top end of 13stone (If your a yank use Google to work out that just in pounds or learn that our way is better) and so far I have lost about 8 pounds, that included a weeks holiday so im happy so far although id like to get down to 12 stone 3 pounds – Top end of ideal for my height.

Spending all day and night in front of a macbook isnt the ideal way to keep slim and I reckon like most of IT most SEO’s could lose a bit of weight.

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Well off I go for the only vacation I get each year and a day or two into the trip, some time on the evening when we were having a nice stroll here one evening

Some guys decided it would be amusing to hack the forum and replace me as Admin. I actually first got to see it when I checked my email from Goonhilly but only managed to get a good enough connection last night to get it all sorted out.

They did some messing with the database, categories and the settings.php file. All via their admin status so it wasnt too hard to sort out really.

UPDATE:
Looks like they have had more fun than I first thought and we may have to do a complete restore from the sql backup to get the site back to what it should be, it also looks like they did this over a longer period than I first thought so its even more messy Oh joy

Upgrade SMF time again YAWN…..

In my previous posts we solved the crappy 404 in SMF and sorted off site links so they didnt harm us, ohh and tweaked the post page to have slightly better on page SEO (Slightly….)

One last thing to change and a story of why I changed it.

I have been looking to build the forum and community at Affearners (My affiliate forum) and so have chosen to let anyone register even if they have a username like greg123hhgxnbv and an email like spam123444@hgsdhgs23.cn

I have a reasonable appreciation for spam techniques as you may know so was aware of the risks of this policy so kept a close eye on it all for a while.
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I have had a few problems with people dropping links in their posts or signatures over at my Affiliate Marketing Forum – Affearners so I decided to check a few of them out.

One really nasty one went to the sort of porn that nobody should be interested in and we also had one that went to a site that tried to install some malware on my computer. So enough is enough, had a chat to a few people to run some ideas around (Thanks to JasonD and Perk in particular) and came up with the following plan: -

All links going off site would be intercepted and run through a jumper page to check the link out first.
Any links that were tagged as approved would then pass on and work as normal.
Any links that hadnt been approved would simply be displayed on a page for people who really wanted to go to them to copy and paste into their browser and leave.

So how to do all this on SMF?

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