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Nice design, although some of the style elements are pretty familiar. I like 100% forums too.

The forum subject is a funny one though. Straight people truly are weird.

I'd suggest starting your anti-spam efforts with something simple, like the simple 'human test' mod linked below.

http://punbb.informer.com/forums/viewtopic.php?id=16076

or the similar but more sophisticated human test mod by Jacky available here:

http://www.punres.org/files.php?pid=503

and discussed here:
http://punbb.informer.com/forums/viewtopic.php?id=19029
and
http://www.network-technologies.org/Pro … mod_punbb/

Both mods VERY easy to install.

Then add extra measures like for example a graphical CAPTCHA if the pain persists. Punres.org has tons of Pun anti-spam tools for you to choose from.

Hmmm. I don't mean to be negative, but it is indeed a bit visually boring, as matt1298 says.

Also it is not clear what the forum is about. If I stumbled upon it as a result of a page 3 SERP on some keyphrase or something, I don't think I'd linger on this forum for about more than 3 seconds, let alone register.

Oh, and why are you showing off a FluxxBB forum here

I *knew* this would happen.

I've been through this before with the fork of the Mambo CMS > Joomla several years ago. Things changed with the original Mambo project (IP and ownership issues etc) in a similar manner to what has happened to PunBB, and a big chunk of the core devs and hackers soon left, worried that their input was being commercialised and open source ideals were being compromised.

But it is very disruptive and lots of things can suffer. For example with the Mambo/Joomla fork, the security of the code in Mambo (never that great) and Joomla went completely to crap for a long long time, since with the shift of devs and code no one knew what was going on and those who took an interest in security auditing in one project didn't bother with the other code base anymore.

The disruption caused by the fork also meant I never touched Mambo or Joomla again. I went across to a CMS with a more stable developer heritage and community instead.

For the moment I'll probably move on over to FluxBB too if the code is (at least for now) compatible with PunBB, since I have a lot of mods and hacks to worry about integrating into it. 

But please, no more radical moves, or I'll have to seriously start looking at Phorum or SMF or even (shudder) PhpBB...

PS - don't the core devs who are leaving now for FluxBB feel bad about ragging so heavily on the poor guy who forked v1.3 into SunBB about a year ago?

As a fellow Windows 2000 user too, I'm all with you MattF. New and shiny does not always trump secure and stable.

There is nothing inherently in-secure either in the W2K OS or IE6 as a browser. FF, Opera, IE etc all have security issues, depending very much on how you run and use them.

What we shouldn't be arguing about is the need to produce good standards compliant HTML that modern, popular browsers like IE6 can render successfully.

I think any punbb forum/ style developer would do well to read the Yahoo guidelines on graded browser support here:
http://developer.yahoo.com/yui/articles/gbs/

IE6 is still considered a Grade A browser that web developers should still certainly aim to support.

Interesting. I found it impossible to register using IE6 though - clicking on register.php off the forum menu generated a blank page. Doing the same in FF2 successfully generated a visible page though. Something is amiss there.

Also best of luck running a security site on a /C IP address range shared with sites like muslimhackers.com. Any site anywhere in the neighbourhood of that is likely going to attract (TLA) attention in this day and age.

I suggest that you be on your best behaviour...   

Nice default forum style. But the style switcher at the bottom of the forum index page didn't work for me.

Also while the home page of the site looks very attractive, it was slow to load due to all the graphics, all your many many javascripts, and all the Flash stuff. :-(

And what is the site anyhow? It just looks like a cute front-end onto various travel affiliate schemes. Where's the original content :-)

He seems to be using snews as his CMS - http://www.snewscms.com

I forgot to mention: I also like the one-eyed cow in the header image

That's a very nice punbb implementation. The emphasis on trying to make the forum user friendly with the simplified index page and the flat forum structure is cool.

I also like the custom header image that appears on a per-forum basis. Is there a mod for that?

Don't like the site background image though, and the default font size is too small.

The forum footer also behaves a bit erraticly. When browsing the forums or reading a topic in IE6 the 'copyright -terms of use' etc links sometimes sit right over the top of the cover image of his book, or sometimes also jump up off the bottom of the page and sit amongst the Facebook etc logos. Must be an open CSS { somewhere in the style-sheet or something.

Very nicely done, particularly the forum. Good, simple colour scheme of complementary and subtle colours. It's also nice and fast.

The site also looks very cute and friendly, which is great and something I like a lot in web design but don't see enough of.

Menu's across the site need work though - ideally you'd have one consistent menu across all areas of the site. But there are about 3 different top level menus evident on the site - in the forum, in the blog, and in the directory - that look different and work differently too. That's visually messy and navigationally confusing.

It was also navigationally unclear to me how to exit the forum and return to the site home page because there is no link in the forum menu to 'home', just to 'blog'.

I also don't think it is necessary to have the forum link in the main blog menu open the forum up in a new browser window. Why bother with a new window.

Sitemap also turned up a blank page for me initially and then appeared fully only after a page refresh. Don't know why.

Yes, it's an interesting challenge you have set yourself.

But lots of punbb forum owners will no doubt appreciate any work you do to help defeat spammers and further improve this mod.

Questions I have made up are careful not to feature any answers that might contain text from anywhere else on the page. Each question is also phrased uniquely - there are no sets of three similar questions, for example, as there are in the default set. And if a question requires a numeric response, the answer is always at least 4 digits long

Furthermore, I also recommend that anyone who deploys this mod take a few extra measures:

(a) place the human test question in a slightly different location in the HTML code of register.php than the default (ie place the question above or below it's default location in the example register.php supplied in the mod);

(b) rename the two-pairs of publicly visible form response variables in the HTML of the supplied register.php ( ie name="human_test" ) to something unique to your forum;

(c) rename the human test question legend in the HTML code of the supplied register.php from "Human Test" to something unique to your forum too.

By making each deployment of this mod unique, these measures may make it harder for scripted bot attacks against this mod in future. At least in theory.

Brute force detection could be a useful feature to add. It could be a classic 'three-strikes and you are out' type of system, which can sometimes be tricky to build. Or perhaps you could use something similar to the post-flood control that is already in punbb that just sets and enforces a (variable) throttle on the allowed time between form responses. That might also be effective.