After offering to be a moderator on the forums at Zenhabits, Leo (and I) noticed that there are a lot of spam bots that hit hard on phpbb2 forums. I also noticed this on my own website with a forum A Geeks Life (which doesn’t do much really). But I searched for so many ways to stop spam bots, banning email addresses, forum modifications to stop them from signing up, preventing bots from seeing user lists. The list just goes on and it’s irritating. Seeing them come flooding into Leo’s site was definately what got my ass into gear and to look at what I was going to do about it.

I first had this idea, and that’s what I’m developing at the moment in my spare time, and I thought it would be a damn site useful for people like Leo from Zenhabits for when they set up their own websites that they can counter this kind of spam and make their website easier to manage. Basically a place for resources.

Bring forth the ‘Tidy Collaboration Project’. I’ve had the domain lying around for a while and thought I’d use it. So to give you an idea, I like to work on the saying from a good friend of mine which has become somewhat of a life philosophy, “keepin’ it tidy”. ‘Tidy Collaboration Project’ isn’t its official name, it’s only what I’m calling it while I work on it. I’ll have something when I launch it that will knock your socks off

That’s exactly what I’m going to try and to, help people control and develop their site no matter how their experience is with the web. They may be just a blogger who is new to the game, or someone who’s been around for years looking for something that can help them get their site going and some traffic.

But there’s a catch, it will be user powered. Let’s take the PHPbb spam bot saga again, you can actually save out a file of banned addresses from your forums. So what I’d like to do is use that as a base for people who have banned addresses to submit them to my site and we build one huge database that people can download and load into their own database and stop the spam quicker. Also a mix of tutorials for beginners and the like.

The site has also been a steep learning curve for myself, I haven’t dabbled much in database work. But this one I’m trying to base it around phpbb but I’m not having any luck as it’s a pain of a system to use with multiple style sheets and conflicting with other style sheets on the site. Major, major headaches!

Anyway, that’s what I’m up to in my spare time and hopefully I’ll have it launched in the next month or two. I’ll have some more details on this and probably looking for some staff (read – volunteers) to run it and contribute to the community, promote it and what not.