My company recently decided to add a message board to our website. We have a very nice email subscriber base, but wanted to increase usage of the website simply to develop more of a community. So this past week I researched some free software, installed it, and configured it. I paid special attention to security and locking out spammers. I settled upon PunBB software, with the Akismet spam addon.

Everything looked to be working fine. I registered an account under our publisher’s name, posted a welcome message, and posted a copy of the day’s newsletter.

At this point, I was banned. The newsletter contains advertisements, which my plugin picked up as spam (correctly). Unfortunately, it didn’t have any configuration options and apparently has no problem banning a user with administrative rights.

The problem was, it wasn’t just that login that was banned, it was my IP address. So I couldn’t log in under the administrator account either. I even tried a proxy server (which I could use to mask my IP address), but it caught me doing that as well. I removed all entries of my IP address from the database itself, but I still couldn’t log in (in the end, it looks like there was a ban cache file that I missed).

It was also at this point that I noticed my publisher had a big red “BANNED” sign next to his name. Classy.

I ended up reaching a friend who saved me by taking a few minutes, logging in as administrator, and unbanning me. However I soon realized, after trying to find support for this issue, that this software as a bit too barebones for what I needed to do. I ended up trashing the whole thing and going with another recommended software, Simple Machines Forum. I got that up in 40 minutes, just in time to edit the URL to the forums in the newsletter and send it out.

Sometimes, those little frantic moments can be quite fun.