As previously planned, the Shell Providers forum is now available only to users with Halfop status or above. It has been pretty quiet there since it became visible only to registered users, so this is mainly a pre-emptive move. Longtime users will be aware that an open forum for disucussion of shell providers is a magnet for veiled advertising and mudslinging, and you can never be sure whether to trust the "reviews" being offered. Hopefully as a sort of "private club" for members who've contributed to other parts of the forum, the dicussion can be a bit more open and recommendations more useful.
For users without Halfop status, links to other forums with open shell provider dicussion may be posted in this thread.
The lifecycle of a noob is complex. Fledgling noobs gestate inside biometric pods. Once a budding noob has matured thru gestation they climb out of their pod, sit down at a PC, ask a bunch of questions that are clearly in the FAQ, The Noob is born
'tis a pity you couldn't just make it read only for those without halfop status (some of us like to read the comments even when we don't have any of our own to contribute).
If I have the time I'll find a more advanced way of limiting access, and perhaps open the forum for viewing by registered users (the existing mod doesn't allow this). A loophole in the current limitation is it allows a user to go on a bit of a posting spree (e.g. lots of superficial replies to old posts) to inflate their post count. This is precisely what one user has done in order to regain access and continue a petty squabble, which has now been deleted.
EDIT: The forum is open again to all registered users, for the moment.
Is there a way to ban usernames from specific threads?
The lifecycle of a noob is complex. Fledgling noobs gestate inside biometric pods. Once a budding noob has matured thru gestation they climb out of their pod, sit down at a PC, ask a bunch of questions that are clearly in the FAQ, The Noob is born
Im sure there is a mod for phpBB that can be writen to do that.
phpBB can do almost everything IPB can do with the addition of a few mods. phpBB is good stuff generally