This week, we spent an inordinate amount of time administering our forum (http://forum.logicalexpressions.com). Because of the amount of email I get and because we have books and software products to support, we put up the forum a few months ago.
The bad news is that I can’t answer computer questions via email anymore. Answering the same type of question more than once is time-consuming. Plus, if the answer is in the forum, it’s online and other people can get the benefit of the answer later. (I surf forums for answers to my computer questions all the time.)
Unfortunately, like everything else online, our little forum has been discovered by the low-lives that will do anything for a link. This bad element is the same one that delights in destroying blogs with their useless “comments” that are nothing but links back to their gross sites. Our forum had a few offensive posts, which I deleted, but it turns out the losers were going for links in their “profiles” as well. I had almost 100 bogus users sign up that I had to delete and ban.
What you have to do to edit the forum code and deal with these problems is beyond my level of nerdiness. Fortunately, James got past his aversion to the PHP programming language and helped me out.
The side effect of all this “locking down” is that the forum is now private. We’ve created it largely for readers of our newsletters, including Logical Tips. So if you are a Logical Tips subscriber, please feel free to sign up (you may want to read the Forum Rules in the Announcement section first). We’ll continue to answer questions there as best we can. And we’ll do our utmost to keep the vermin out of the forum, so it can be as useful as possible to you.