I used HTTrack to copy the forums for offline mode a few days ago. I accidentally copied the whole thing (I think) instead of just the CC section. The whole thing is roughly 3gb in size. Also there is a concerning amount of Nick Cage memes that were grabbed in the process.
I can't log in though, so only public threads/forums/downloads are available, which is pretty much everything relevant.

As for registrations, perhaps it is time to implement a proper capcha? or other anti-spambot protection?
Does that kind of stuff cost money?
And does the current so called "protection" ever change or is it the same "enter last letters of word" all the time?
Maybe adding some more words/different questions and have them change all the time, or maybe the "enter numbers shown in picture" method.

Nice, that's probably as good a backup method as we can get. And it even got all the Nic Cage images! What we do if those were lost?

I've tried various Captcha methods (Q&A, images, etc.) over the years and it's never worked. I'm not sure how they're being circumvented exactly, but the bots get through anyway. reCAPTCHA would be a big improvement, but the version of PHPBB we're running only supports reCAPTCHA v1, which has been shut down for a while now. I don't have the permissions necessary to install better plugins or update the forum, unfortunately.

Well that's a shame... Guess you'll have to close it.
Wow 320k members. I'd say a solid 300k are bots for sure, that needs some serious purging.

Seems my attempt was pretty ♥♥♥♥ because i'm going through it and a lot of threads didn't get grabbed, even whole pages are missing.
Is bandwidth and traffic an issue in 2018 DRL? I'd like to try again with different settings.

One of the bots had a link in the profile to some ♥♥♥hole spam software that is probably used on us.
Here's some info https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XRumer
Here's the website http://www.botmasterlabs.net/xrumer/
♥♥♥♥ seems pretty serious, with all sorts of bypasses to all types of security.
I think people that develop these deserve the guillotine. ♥♥♥♥ Russians by the way.

Yeah, it's definitely Russian bots and it's definitely inflating our member count by a huge amount. Most of the ones spamming right now are actually sleeper agents that joined back in spring, so I can't even easily purge them based on join date.

I doubt traffic is an issue, though I don't really know for sure. I don't have access to those stats unfortunately.

Well it's a real shame you don't have proper control over the forums despite being the only(?) active admin around.

Also, holy hell, what is going on?

Unfortunately, having admin'd a phpBB forum in a similar situation (specifically, the Battleships Forever forums), various advanced CAPTCHA methods are just a pain in the ass for legitimate users and yet easily bypassed by automated systems. We had a really bad spate of bots signing up to spam us for a long time, and I was regularly using the "prune users" feature to clean them out.

Our primary method of filtering them was to use a simple Q&A on signup, and then Moderation Queue for all new users, and I think users in the newly registered group were not allowed to define certain things in their profile like the signature. After a while they seem to have stopped trying - I guess our methods eventually convinced them that we weren't worth trying to use the bump their numbers.

Mostly I think what they're trying to do is get links to appear in possible searches so that it makes the linked site is more likely to appear in future searches, or something. Advertising and search algorithms are really ♥♥♥♥ weird.

First time posting here in the lounge. I tried making a mod for this game about a year or so ago, on my old computer before building this new one. Gave up mostly because coding weapons and compiling all the things is a bit of a chore, I found out. Aside from that, sprites were never an issue.

Aside from that, I just want to gloat about my old modding career before I dropped off the face of the planet of another game. Mostly since I can show off that I'm not exactly a slouch for working with pixelated media, even though what I used to do was voxels. My stuff is here, or at least most of it is since I deleted a few things from imgur. This stuff goes further back than 2013, as the first forums were lost when Jagex purchased Ace of Spades.

This all boils down to: I'd like to provide something for this community, but I don't quite know where to start right now. Coding the weapons is, like I said, a chore, since I'm only used to doing the art side of things. Anybody know where to start or how I can make coding weapons less a pain?

No pain, no gain my friend.

There really aren't any shortcuts. You just need to keep at it until you get better. It takes time and determination.
Even after that i'd say it's still quite a pain sometimes.

You can have a look HERE for some tutorials that will help you figure out the whole mod making process.

You could always ask someone to do the coding for you, if you find anyone, because there aren't many active people around.

Nice voxels you have there btw.

Yikes.
Well on the bright side I had a bit of practice with it before, best I can say is it was tedious and occasionally game crashing since it couldn't find what went where sometimes. At least I've got sprites down, they're not much different from voxels. Even still I could whip out slab 6 and model the weapon and just turn that into a sprite. Actors and materials might be a bit more of a pain though. Thanks for the response.

Your best bet is to base your stuff off other people's mods until you get the hang of it.
That's pretty much the only shortcut if you can call it like that, because a lot of code is recycled throughout many mods for many years.
Nobody actually writes the code from scratch (the .ini part), you borrow a chunk from base and work with it, take a few snippets from here and there and apply your own edits.
Once you make sense of the basics debugging your code will also be a much easier task.

Overall it isn't really difficult to get into.

I'm not the best at anything modding wise but I can probably answer most questions you may have so feel free to PM me and i'll help if I can.

So here I am casually trying to reply to a thread on my phone and suddenly THIS happens and I'm like


Seems the mystery behind presence of Cage memes in the database is now unraveled - to some extent - though many questions remain unanswered.

This is pretty bizzare but gave me a good chuckle.

That's more or less what I planned on doing. I wanted to balance things more or less around vanilla so I actually did some testing earlier today on what weapons I should balance things around. So if the glock is the game's version of a 9mm bullet at 375 m/s and the M16 is the game's version of a 5.56 at ~950 m/s I can more or less balance things around that. I'm trying to test all my stuff against silvermen to get an idea of just how much damage they should do against armor without being overpowered.

Altus Robitics has very clean cut formatting, so I'll probably use that as a base for the code and tweak it to my desired stats.

Good old konami code cage.

I believe Cage mode was an April Fools' joke from many years ago. Why or how it activated for you is beyond our mortal comprehension.

It commonly activates for mobile users with a seemingly random sequence of presses or taps on the screen.