I've got my MUD in a semi-reasonable state, and my scripting code now supports arrays, which is needed to get lists of things (users in a room, items a user has, etc), and is generally tidier.
I've got yet another side project though (*sigh*) - some forum software. I've been getting 4 spammers a day registering on my forums, and usually at least one of them posting some crap links. I don't know why the number of spammers has suddenly exploded.
So anyway, partly as a learning exercise, partly because I don't like the way phpbb does some things and partly because there's parts I want to add to my forums but don't want to crawl through phpbb to do (It took me a full day or two to get an "Image of the day" forum working on a friends site) I'm going to make my own forums.
It'll start off as nothing fancy, just the basic posting in forums, registration and so on. Things I want to add:
- Image forums (Like GDNets IOTD)
- More anti-spam control, such as disallowing users posting links on their first post, no links in signatures for the first week, etc
- Attachments, like vBulletin
- A shared calendar for user groups, so people can mark events (My friends fail at remembering events)
- Possible support for embedding flash / quicktime / youtube videos in posts (This might be annoying though)
- More user tracking - I want to be able to see what the last 20 things a user did was, such as registered, posted, send a PM, so on - I belive GDNet has something similar
That should keep me busy for a while.
Anyway, back to my BitWriter / BitReader class I've spent 6 hours on so far (Fsking CRCs) :(
Anyway I think just creating your own forums "could" secure you if you implement proper security, as most spammers target widely used software rather than roll your owns.