About us forum

Hi all.

Yes I'm still on my back so still making more improvements to the forum -- you should see the destination guide inputing pile that is growing beside me as I type -- I do need to be able to sit up to do that though -- hopefully inside a week.

Anyway, my falling apart body aside, a couple of updates:

Forum subscriptions
Being able to unsubscribe to threads you subscribed to but never posted to will FINALLY be fixed today.

Travelfish writers
We'll be adding a marker (similar to the "admin" button that you see in the left column for when I post) to denote that the poster also works for us as a Travelfish writer. We're doing this primarily because we think it is more transparent to other readers. We're certainly not doing it to say "Hey this poster knows more than a non-Travelfish writer" -- because in practise they probably don't!

Hello again Nepal and China
We're adding a new level of spam-protection which means we'll be unblocking traffic from China and Nepal. Yes caseyprich - no more VPN required! (For those not aware we had previously blocked all traffic from China and Nepal, both due to incessant spamming practises coming from there). If the new spam protection doesn't work well, the "Great Wall of Travelfish" will return.

This new spam protection may result in a few false positives, please bear with us -- if you get a "moderated message", don't worry, we're not going all Thorn Tree on you -- we'll be keeping a close eye on it and will adjust it accordingly.

New countries
Probably the biggest change will be we'll be adding a few new countries to the forum. Some of these are outside Southeast Asia, but we think they're still on a well travelled trail and we think they'd be a handy extension to the forum, especially for travellers on longer overland and RTW trips (hint hint). Before you ask, no this doesn't mean we'll be expanding the destination guide -- we're quite content trying to cover Southeast Asia thanks!

We're settling on how we're going to add these new countries -- either regionally or by individual country -- but should have decided later today.

Closing forums
We'll be closing to new posts the Competitions, Travel news and Travel deals sections, primarily because they have become big fat spam magnets.

Revised forum guidelines
We're formalising the revised forum guidelines we proposed here and will incorporate them into the sign-up page and so on. Thanks for your feedback in that regard.

Well, I think that's enough to keep me busy today.

Any thoughts, as always, welcome.