Over the last few months, many changes have been made to help improve the functionality of Ozzu. Some of these have been bug fixes around flagging, but the most recent changes are regarding the implementation of using both StopForumSpam and AbuseIPDB. In the past, we mainly had reCaptcha as the main defensive measure which does a great job and stopping the vast majority of dumb bots, but with the smarter more sophisticated bots and even some human spammers, my hope is these new tools will combat some of that too.
While we have review queues on Ozzu which prevent any spam whatsoever from appearing on Ozzu publicly; the integrations of both StopForumSpam and AbuseIPDB should further help to prevent malicious robots from joining Ozzu. This translates into smaller review queues for members to handle.
Another noticeable change we made was to fix real-time notifications while you are on the website. This was completely broken, and to further complicate things Microsoft Edge also caused further issues due to sleeping tabs. All those have now been resolved. Additionally when any real time notifications happen, it will also update the title that shows in the browser tab to include the number of notifications you haven’t seen yet.
The last change to mention is that email summaries, especially for Gmail, should be more precise and meaningful. That is the part you see before clicking on the email, for example:
Most of the other changes affected the internals of Ozzu, and nothing much that users would notice.
Fall's Full List of Changes
- Integrated AbuseIPDB service into user registration #2217
- Added functionally to report spam to StopForumSpam service #802
- Integrated StopForumSpam service into user registration #802
- Fixed issue where banning user and deleting posts did not result in all flags closing #2216
- Add notification counts to start of title for browser tabs updates #2215
- Resolve issues with sleeping tabs losing web socket connections and refreshing userbar #2213
- Fixed bell and review queue notifications not updating in real time #2186
- Updated composer packages to latest #2160
- Enabled persistent connections for redis #2212
- Removed old phpbb3 migration files no longer needed #2210
- Removed the needs for files subdomain and moved all content storage to S3 #2209
- Updated composer and hook to support download only for priming composer cache #2207
- Updated robots txt with some bad moz bots #2206
- Optimized home page queries to avoid BLOB/TEXT columns and to use fixed dates #2201
- Enabled persistent connections for MySQL #2200
- Optimized email summary text shown to clients #2174
