By Scott Tibbs, January 6, 2009
A couple months ago, I moved Multi-Level Political Debate from the Invision forum where it has resided since 2005 to a phpBB forum. That move was not successful, and I have closed the phpBB forum and re-opened the old one. The forum address, as before, is MultiLevel.forumer.com.
This past weekend, I was trying to figure out how to enable "guest" posting on MLPD, so that people who do not have an account on the forum could post comments. This was to allow the forum to be an "open" comment section for this blog, especially since there is a "comment on this post" link at the bottom of each post on the main page. I had enabled guest posting in the past, but spambots posting inappropriate links caused me to disable the feature. Recently, I decided to try again.
Although I was sure I had enabled everything that needed to be enabled, guest posting just was not working. After testing the guest posting feature on the (now closed) phpBB forum, I discovered that guest posting does not work there either. The Invision forum gives guests a message that "guest posting is currently disabled" while phpBB does not tell you that until after you try to submit the post.
It turns out that Forumer.com (where MLPD is hosted) has disabled guest posting on all forums across the Forumer.com network. The explanation was that administrators on some forums were allowing guest posting and not controlling it, so spambots were causing problems. It is unfortunate that is the case, but I can see why Forumer would take that step.
I am going to try to figure out a way to allow a "open" comments for those who want to respond to something on the blog but do not want to register an account on MLPD. Unfortunately, that is not going to happen on MLPD. (Because of the way this site is set up, comments on the posts themselves is not a possibility.) If anyone has any suggestions regarding how to allow a more open off-site comment section, email tibbs1973@yahoo.com and let me know.
