Many of the headline features in this update are for the chat facility that we do not currently have deployed at Maker Forums, but one in particular is that bios for users with no posts are hidden from anonymous and low-trust-level users.
One kind of spammer we encounter on Maker Forums is the “bio spammer” who doesn’t read a single post, fills out a bio with a commercial description and link to their site (clearly meant to create “SEO juice” to try to prioritize their site over other sites), and leaves. While we delete and block all those users, their efforts have been visible to site indexing until we notice and fix it. Not any more! Unless people actually participate in the site, their bio will not show and their spam will be even more useless, and we won’t have to worry about our response times as we moderate the new users who show up.
As usual, this release comes with a few security updates.
As we near the end of the year, we would like to express our gratitude for Civilized Discourse Construction Kit, the company who build, sponsor, and maintain Discourse as Open Source software, for making this community site possible.