After giving it some thought, I’ve come to the decision to shut down these forums. I’m not doing it immediately. I’ll leave these forums up for awhile, but the user registration will be closed.

The reason I’m shutting them down is simply time. I no longer have as much of it and I don’t want to spend it maintaining these forums. It wouldn’t be so bad if I could just let them run themselves, but for some reason, these forums are a prime target to spam bots, often porn, which makes it worse.

I’ve tried making users confirm their registration by email. That doesn’t work.

I’ve tried doing registration authorization by admin, but I literally get dozens and sometimes over 100 registrations day. 90% of them are spam bots.

I had to completely turn off registration and do them manually to avoid spam, which is a big hassle and not really good for users. I don’t have the time to do it. Sometimes it takes me weeks to get to all the requests.

So now what?

In reality, I don’t know if these forums are really needed anymore. Facebook, twitter, goolge+ and other social sites should be able to handle the role of finding players and supporting users. All that is really required is a central place for links to all the various resources. So that’s what I intended to do.

I’m going to redo the openrpg.com homepage and make it a catalog of links openrpg reosurces. If you have a resource (website, facebook page, forum, whatever) that you think I should list, post it below or email (chris at rpgobjects.com) the info. It will be easier for me to maintain the list rather than these forums.

If people want, I’ll create a facebook page for openrpg and add other owners to help maintain that as well. I’m open to other idea as well. I’m just done with these forums.

If my decision makes you unhappy or angry at me, I’m sorry.

Post links and other feedback below.

I'll help in whatever way I can, Chris.

I'd like to suggest a Facebook and a Google+ page, and a web site widget that displays the latest information from those resources. Both Google and Facebook have made it easy to have more than one account.

Darn..........sorry to hear that, but it's understandable I guess given the number of spambots that seem to plague the forums.

I'd suggest adding a link to EN World's "Gamers Seeking Gamers" forum, which I've used before to organize groups for OpenRPG games.
http://www.enworld.org/forum/gamers-seeking-gamers/

Is it possible to transfer board Amin rights to someone else?

Errm, admin, can ya restore the private message accessibility for now? I can't seem to access my private messages now, and I was just about to copy over any important info from them.

Edit: Thanks, was able to copy over the bits and pieces of old but potentially-still-useful info from private messages, for some of my old campaigns that I hope to restart if I get the chance.

One thing I'm trying to find a convenient way of doing is archiving the Mekton Zeta thread. Lots of information was lost with the last forum because we never made a copy, and I'd like to get one while we can.

Anyone know of a solution that doesn't involve manually saving 100 pages?

I might be able to craft a small python script that would automate this for you, but it looks like there is no option you can change in the settings.

I have a friend who MAY be able to craft a bot who will temporarily block anyone who makes more than 3 posts in a time frame of 10 minutes, and i they do this repetedly delete them, and the bot can also search for keywords in posts to ban.