Hi folks,

I created a website for my wife ( http://www.tackypolice.com) which she, as a school teacher, is always too busy to moderate and update. Unfortunately, Joomla is a security nightmare if you have forums on it. Every update to its community builder produces 1500 attempts by russian hackers to register or worse. It seems that somehow they know immediately if an update is applied to patch something.

Fortunately, I can check these names against known forum spammers:

http://www.stopforumspam.com but it is not automatic.

I am so disgusted with this labor that I’d like to move to what seems to be more secure: WordPress. The interface would be easier to use for my wife.

But I have a few questions:

If you use a Forum on a WordPress site, are you any better off or are you going to encounter the same spam/hacker problem that will require constant manual oversight?

Is there a way to preserve and transfer your valid user database and forums and posts to the new service?

I wonder if joomla is targeted more just because it is a known security sieve…

Or would anyone recommend Drupal or something else instead for some of these issues?

After this experience, I would never recommend Joomla to anyone. What a time waster.

Thanks

Jeff

[@chrishajer Participant 15 years, 1 month ago]

Having run sites with WordPress, bbPress and Joomla, I have had less security issues with WordPress and never one with bbPress. bbPress is certainly less used, so it’s less of a target (like Apple for viruses, for example.) WordPress security releases seem to be fixed fairly quickly. There was an update this week to 2.8.6 for example, to fix some security issues.

I’ve done 3 sites with Joomla and about 40 sites with WordPress, and 3 bbPress forums. I would never recommend Joomla to anyone either.

Drupal had too steep a learning curve for me, and with 2.9 WordPress is adding custom post types, which was a strong point for Drupal in the past.

10 Things You Need to Know About WordPress 2.9

I would use WordPress. But before you install bbPress, define what you want in your forum installation, and post that here. Integration is not a strong point with bbPress and WordPress right now. If you desire integrated logins between WordPress and bbPress, you might want to consider a WordPress forum plugin instead of bbPress.

[@jefferisp7 Member 15 years, 1 month ago]

thank you chrishajer.

Right now on the forums, I have major categories like tacky lamps, tacky decorations, tacky parties, etc. The members can post comments and photos. In Joomla, I’ve also linked the users with photogalleries they can create using Coppermine. I have set up moderation to approve people before they can join because they spammers were atrocious.

I’ve used Community Builder to coordinate user registration, postings, and their galleries. I used Fireboard as the forum plugin and it integrates with Community Builder.

A couple of problems I noted is that there was no way for the community to report bad posts or spam, which made more work for the moderator (me) having to approve posts until I got to know the people.

What I’d like to have is a self policing community, spammer protection, and some automated filters for bad language and the like, with the ability to report abuse to the moderators. Then I’d like the members to be free to create as they like.

So, I’m hoping to duplicate these features in a WP environment…

Aside from that, there would be articles and news by editors that would be normal WP stuff.

Maybe I should wait for WP 2.9?

Jeff

[@katastimata Member 15 years, 1 month ago]

I have used wordpress, muwordpress, drupal and joomla and proprietary CMS extensively, for any kind of website. I’m about to start testing bbpress but I have to say that I’m a bit sceptical.

One thing is that the best communities I have ever seen are based on forum specialized software (not going to mention these here, you know them). So in order to establish a well performing online community I suggest that you use one of these software (bbpress seems to be one of these).

The other thing is that the community will help protect the community, so unless you build it and it grows, you won’t be able to keep it clean and tidy all by yourself.

[@katastimata Member 15 years, 1 month ago]

I suppose that the ideal for me would be a bridge between bbpress (or anything else) and drupal (or anything else). Just pick the best (for you) specialized software for all different parts of your website and integrate them (as seamlessly as possible).