Gerard

There are many levels of security implemented - the main one is requiring all new members to type in the letters they read in an image when they register (called CAPTCHA). This prevents computers from being able to register because they cannot interpret the images. Some computers are good at Optical Character Recognition (OCR), so we twist and swirl the letters in different fonts and add colours and gradients to make it near-impossible for computers to read. The downside is that all it takes is human involvement for 3 seconds and the bot is registered and can post until they're banned. We can then IP ban them and everything else, but it isn't too complicated to bypass those measures. Bots aren't too bad a problem anyway, and the admins can remove all their posts in roughly six seconds from noticing just one of them. That's why the staff look to the members to help do the noticing bit.

yay - that's pretty cool. IJSAB is only 17 posts away from the top ten - afaik the very first female ever to grace that list. That's quite a decent achievement, especially without spamming.

Seems people here have pretty strong opinions about what they want. Let's see if Rockstar think they know better than we do I'm just glad that only six people voted for "An Existing City"

I'm a big fan of the changing seasons sets of wishes - having different weather sets (hot, snow etc), differently dressed peds (coats, swimming gear), different vehicles (gritters vs ice cream vans) and various other things. The problems come when you're picking how long seasons last - realtime (depending on the actual season) would be too slow and unnoticable, changing every few ingame days would perhaps get repetitive for hardcore players.

Probably not. Can never be sure, but a bot might as well be called "joe" or "pornbot" or anything. The rest isn't even a word so its either completely random (which MIGHT mean its a bot) or meaning something else that we don't understand/

Our moderators know how to deal with all the issues they face on the forums. The problem is that if they haven't found the problem (eg a spam post or bot) then they obviously can't deal with them. Members who report these issues to the staff gives them the best opportunity to deal with the issues. You don't need to contact a staff member every time you read a rude word or "don't like the sound of" someone, only if you see an obviously spam post or inappropriate content or whatever. That member name is just a coincidence. It looks more like modsn's ex to me, or it could just be random letters (google says no). Dont report it unless its actually a really bad word, or if they start spamming. However, it is worse not to report something than report something not that bad. Just be sensible - you're basically sending a PM/IM/email to a staff member saying "hey look at this, I think you might want to deal with it".

The idea of the report button is that it jsut sends a quick message to all moderators saying "hey this post might be bad", they can check it out and delete it. It's nothing more than PMming a moderator or mentioning it on IM. It is for any post that you think might need dealing with. The moderators can deal with it (if neccessary), eg editing/deleting/moving/suspending or whatever and that's that. Don't overuse it stupidly to report spelling mistakes or someone saying something you don't agree with. And certainly don't ask staff questions using that. It is annoying and gets ignored. Just use it if you see anything bad. Its almost like moderating yourself - finding out what needs to be dealt with. It is a great way of showing the admins that you would make a good moderator.

Geez the amount of flaming that's going on in here... the warzone is there for a reason. As this has shown, many people find reading proper English easier and that certainly applies to foreigners. We have a large international population on TGTAP, and those who have spent a long time (or not so long) learning English will not be fully aware of all the abbreviations of common words. However, a lot of people conversely find text language easier to type, or just think its cool to be unable to write properly. Yeah? Try not talking properly - develop a lisp and see how many people take you theriouthly. If you read an article in a news paper where the author misspelt stuff and abbreviated everything, you'd think he was stupid probably. There's no reason why you shouldn't talk properly for the benefit of your readers. It actually takes me twice as long to attempt to abbreviate and misspell everything. You can set up your own sites or go to another forum where that kind of thing is acceptable, but on here we do prefer people to at least try to write properly. Not asking for apostrophes in everything, excessive punctuation or unneccessarily long words, just asking you to talk properly so people can understand you.

I think the reasons for these glitches (in SA too) is because they're pushing the games to the limits. No other games have gone as far as these. It's either a case of a great unique game with glitches or a crap boring normal game without. Or we could wait another year to fix them all.

Thats been there since before you could change your display name, and just hasn't been removed yet.

rope helps but i prefer to use network cable

You can get the final version of WMP11 for Win XP now: LINK: Download Page Direct Download: 32-bit - 64-bit

Saved games loading into the start of the game with 0% on all stats Original gtasa, unmodded, known-to-be-working saved games installed correctly and loading fine. Game reinstalled and method verified. Must be a v2 game, even though readme says v1.00

1) That is a violation of Wikipedia rules and violation of copyright, and therefore illegal 2) Anybody can look up information on Wikipedia, why bother having it on tgtap 3) Anybody is capable of pasting a Wikipedia page into a site/forum, waste of space. If you'd USED the Wikipedia content to help you formulate your own pages, that wouldn't be so bad. But just pasting it in and formatting it is unnecessary.

There are big differences between IE and Firefox. Firefox is faster, more secure, better at displaying web pages and you can download thousands of themes and extensions to add functionality to the browser. IE7 is just a copy of a lot of Firefox's features such as tabbed browsing. Firefox 2 goes one step further and adds things like an inbuilt spellchecker.

Yeah have a look at his My Sites page for the run down. Add VistaSector and Grand Theft Wiki onto that list - they belong to both me and Chris.

Let's see what the TGTAP community use in the way of browsers. Vote for the one you PREFER to use, even if you can't use them at school/work or whatever. If you pick "other", please reply saying which one you use. If I have missed an important one, let me know. Perhaps Chris could provide the browser stats for TGTAP visitors? My vote is for Firefox, a great simple browser that gets the job done properly, and has loads of really decent extensions to extend the functionality. What more could you ask for?

You do realise it IS only October, right? Christmas is two months away. Mind you, at the hotel where I work we were putting up decorations on Thursday. They do "Christmas breaks" from now until January, where every Monday is Christmas Eve, and its all... quite appalling really.

I could imagine that error coming up if you were using a browser with dodgy javascript. It all works for me (Firefox 2.0). Which browser are you using? As for quote-in-quote you can set a quotes-per-post limit so you don't end up with people quoting the past fifty posts.

I think it would solve a lot of problems if we let ROI have NI, but it would also create some more. Firstly, organising the removal of a country from the UK is a big task, and lots of things (from maps to governments to taxes to textbooks) would have to be redone. Secondly, some people may see this as the start of the breakup of the UK. Scotland already have their own parliament and are clawing for more and more power. It won't be too long before Scotland begin the calls to separate completely. If Northern Ireland succeed in separation through the decades of violence, then maybe we'll see some pretty bloody Scottish rebellions. After that? I doubt that Wales would choose to go it alone, but the UK would not be seen as the great power the British Empire once was. We conquered the world and gave it back.

You can of course download Firefox 2 now from Getfirefox.com. I suggest you all do so and tell all your friends

I entirely agree. Announcements and such for the gang system should be in their own place, especially if you're trying to make this thing as big as you can. Why make it harder for people to find information? It's not as if you have to pay extra to have an extra subforum.

Yeah, it takes surprisingly little effort to get into a good habit. Its also so much easier to learn when you're writing about stuff you like like GTA.. unlike stuff at school.

I use two firefox extentions: Colorzilla - a colour dropper, selects any colour on the page or an image and displays its value in RGB and Hex Web Developer - a toolbar with masses of functionality, including css/html editing (of the site you're viewing), css/html validation, image viewing (+locations), element outlining (useful for fixing tables/divs) and quick options (eg disable JS) I also make good use of the bookmarks toolbar, having an icon at the top of my screen for all the sites I visit regularly. Not to mention you can download Firefox 2.0 already from Mozilla FTP...

I disagree, it is an option. This forum is doing very nicely, and for the past year its been relatively n00b and hacker-free. The thing is if we want to massively expand, to get some new blood in, then things have to be done. I think we're perfectly content with the current situation, just ready for it to go up a level. We just have to be absolutely careful about the type of traffic we get. It isn't a case of being unlucky if we get n00bs, its absolutely what we're gonna get unless people join for the RIGHT reasons - wanting to talk intelligently about GTA. So we need to get ONLY those people involved. The best way to do that is involve the forums with the site a bit more - just so the people who DO dig deep into the site to find information they are genuinely interested in can then join the forums and enjoy life here.