Just a quick status update for everyone. I'm in my new apartment and I love having space to myself. It's great! I've been running a live test of the new anti-spam system, using dspam. It's about 93% accurate, with zero false-positives so far. It's a 100% learning based system, meaning it's effectiveness should get a lot better as you train it. Spamassassin (the current/old system) catches a few percent more spam... but I had numerous false positives though my time using it, and it still let some spam though. It's also about 10x as resource intensive as dspam. Anyway, point is I think I'm going to switch to dspam for the new server, so that phase of testing is pretty much done. People are also going to have the option of using their email here or not. This time, it'll be totally disabled if not in use, before, there was only the option to forward it, which was fine until the advent of spam. You'd think I was born yesterday, the way I set up some of that stuff before. :-)
Most everything else on the new server is running as well as I would expect. All I've got left is to rewrite some of the account management scripts to modernize things. Right now, I'm working on the script that'll let everyone verify their accounts for transfer to the new server. It's times like this that remind me just how poor of a programmer I really am. I'm having to read the manual for every function it feels like. :-) Anyway, I hope to have this working in the next couple of days, at which point I'll email everyone and ask them to verify their accounts. Basically, you'll be giving a valid (offsite) email, and checking/setting all your account/site information. Also, you'll be required to (re)set your password, so it can be re-encrypted for the new system. Passwords are now going to be checked for cryptographic strength too. I know it's kind of a pain, but dictionary attacks comprise about 2/3rds of the hacking attempts on the server, and all it takes is one person with an easy to guess password, then I'm stuck cleaning up the mess.
Also, I have the intention of doing away with the phase 1 and phase 2 account distinctions. I believe there will be VERY few phase 1 members left after the move, and most of those will hopefully have no problem moving to phase 2. If there's a couple that have issue with the newsbox requirement... well, I'll deal with it on a case-by-case basis. Point is though, everyone will have full access to all features.
Lastly, the newsbox. As I've mentioned, I want to revamp/redo it. It needs to accomplish four functions. 1) Get people to notice that a given site is part of xepher.net 2) Promote other sites here 3) Attract donations 4) Allow emergency "broadcast" announcements. I'm going to do away with the regular/boring "news" items in the newsbox. It'll only be used if there's some critical, site-wide message that needs to go out to most everyone. As such, that last requirement doesn't really need to be fit into the newsbox design, as I can have it add a big red box or some such when needed.
Now, on that though, I'm willing to do just about anything that accomplishes those three goals. I want ideas from ya'll, about what you think would be good. Featured sites need images, not just text, I think that's a given. Beyond that (and what I mentioned already) I don't have any ideas yet.