Hiccupx:
I realise that sometimes it can be hard see that this website is being updated, because so much of the work we do is on the back end. As admins, we probably don't shout enough about website updates, but then, if it's on the back end it's probably not of that much interest to members. Anyway here goes:
Registration/Account Blocking:
We have spend a temendous amount of time this year on improving the registration validation process, to stop bots and spammers creating accounts. We have over 20 validation checks, written by AI, that automatically block the majority of them.
For those that do manage to create accounts, we have new scripts that check the uploaded content to highlight spammers which we then immediately ban.
We're never going to be able to keep out all spammers on a site like this because we want to make it easy to sign up for genuine members and also protect your privacy. Therefore we haven't gone down the phone verification route. We've also learnt that most of the spammers we get are not bots, but people sat in data centers in the far east who do this for a living.
Member Blocking Feature:
This stops blocked members from contacting you but it doesn't stop them viewing your content. The maxmium number of blocks is 100, which we believe should be plenty on a 'community' website. After all, what would be the point in joining a community site, and then blocking hundreds of members?
Chat:
Chat was completely re-written this year as part of the streaming feature (still in beta), however the visible functionality hasn't changed, so it would be difficult to tell as a user. However, with nice clean chat code we're now in a good position to do a major overhaul of the front end at some point. There's a number of possibilities here, including perhaps building the video streaming into the chat?
Perhaps you could start a forum page that only you and other mods can post in called, patches and updates, or something, were you post as updates are rolling out and maybe a brief description of what it does, thisway people understand what's going on
