Invision Plus Blog

Here’s a safety guide for everyone, but especially for board owners.

The biggest problem board owners have is another Admin demoting or deleting them and taking the board for themselves. Here’s how to solve this:

Administrator Issues

Instead of having just one Administrator group on the board, have at least one more. By having another Administrator group that does not have ROOT Admin access, the people in that group will not be able to demote you.

This is just a way of making it less likely that you may get demoted by another Administrator on your board because of them having ROOT access.

This may sound a bit obvious, but only give access to people that YOU TRUST! This is something that everyone should be careful about. Be especially cautious about giving others Administrator access to help fix something, set-up the board, etc. These people are not necessarily trustworthy. ROOT or not, they can still damage the board.

Cracking, Keylogging, etc.

This is generally a very rare occurrence on InvisionPlus.

Make sure the passwords to your InvisionPlus account and email account are safe. When a user’s account is stolen, it’s usually because one or both of these passwords were insecure. Use numbers, symbols, and capital letters in your password.

The use of keyloggers happens very rarely.

If necessary, write your password down to ensure you remember it, but make sure that paper is safe.

Always keep a virus scanner handy, just in case. One option is AVG Anti-Virus from Grisoft.com.

Any software can be a keylogger. For example, it could be a friend’s simple C++ console game, yet stealthily install a backdoor or keylogger without your knowledge at all. If you suspect this, you can open a Command Prompt and type:

netstat -n

… to see if there are any suspicious port numbers or IP addresses. Make sure your software comes from a reliable source.

Keep your anti-virus software updated, and you should be safe from most keyloggers.

Sidenotes and Conclusion

If you have had your board cracked, report it on the Support Board and we will see what we can do.

If an Administrator does something to your site, we can’t help with that. You need to make sure that your Administrators are trustworthy before giving them access.

With new secure measures in place at InvisionPlus today, a second administrator (even if they are in the root group) cannot demote, edit, change password, delete or harm the initial root admin in any way.

However, there are still two things to be aware of:
1) You can edit yourself, so you could accidentally or intentionally demote yourself. However, you cannot delete yourself.
2) If your password is cracked and the cracker demotes you, we may not be able to do anything - so keep your password secure. Here’s one site for testing the strength of your password: SecurityStats.com

That’s it! If you keep in mind these guidelines, you’ll be safe and secure during your stay here on InvisionPlus.

Thanks!

Elliot
InvisionPlus Staff

This guide contains contributions from InvisionPlus Staff members Exode, Alan, and HAL.

So you’ve got a brand new Invision Plus forum. Great!

but where are the members and interesting discussions?

You’ve got to attract visitors to your website. Here are a few tips.

1. Link To Your Forum In Your Sig
Alot of people may find your board by accident by including a link in your sig.
You can do this on any other forums that you visit (providing it is allowed)

2. Promotion In Dedicated Advertisement Forums
Some boards have a specific forum to SPAM (synically advertise) your forum in the hope of attracting visitors.

3. Topsite Lists
These are a very good way to attract traffic to your site. You add your link to the list. Place the button on your website which visitors click to Vote for your vote. The more clicks the higher you get in the list. The higher in the list the more likely people will visit you. You can join exisiting ones or even create your own.
See 3rd party sites which provides Top Sites lists such as
Topsitelists.com
Topsitenet.com
Nuked Topsites

4. Affiliate
A good way for new sites to get some traffic is to affiliate with other websites/boards which have a similar subject. The way affiliation works in that you put a link/banner to their site on your board and request that they put one back to yours.

Where can find affiliates?
Try a google search using similar keywords as your site, see what sites are found. Those are the sites you may want to target for affiliation.

Security Precautions
Tips to protect your forums

To prevent your forum from being hacked, please follow these guidelines.

* Use a secure password. It should be at least 6 characters long and contain both letters and numbers. In addition, you should change your password periodically.
* Choose admins carefully. Avoid choosing people that think differently than you, and avoid any members that have left and returned or previously broken rules.
* Never give out your password. If you are asked for it, the person is probably tyring to break into your board. Do not reply to what looks like official emails. We will not ask you to confirm your board password.
* Never give out a link to your Admin CP. In some instances, the URL can grant access to an attacker.