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Once you have done that all you need to do now is reactivate the original theme.

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Thanks Sue

Even with the site set to registration must be approved we are looking at about 20+ spam registrations per day on a week day. Which is totally ridiculous and time consuming to deal with even when restricted.

The other aspect is the reality is no educators have been posting on it any way.

So here is what I want to do. I’ve been working with BuddyPress which pretty much works the same as Ning but we won’t have the issues with spammers and it runs on WordPress so it’s blog capabilities are considerably better if people want to write posts.

We are moving towards offering BuddyPress on Edublogs Campus because that is what people are starting to request. So James Farmer (CEO Edublogs) has agreed to give us a BuddyPress/Edublogs Campus site to use for Etools and tips community.

My belief is that we should shutdown http://etools.ning.com/ and move across to the new site. I don’t want to publically announce via a broadcast on http://etools.ning.com/ that we are moving to a new site because we don’t want to encourage spammers to move across. They will eventually find it but we have anti-splog tools on the site to deal with them. However, I think if we know any one has written blogs posts on the site we should offer them the opportunity to move the content before we shutdown.

BuddyPress is becoming very big news — although a lot of educators haven’t heard of it yet it is increasing in popularity because it transforms WordPress into a social network that works similar to Ning, Facebook etc.

I’m currently in the process of building the site and when I’ve finished I will let people know it is available to join if they want.

However, let me give you an example. Since I closed joining so it has to be approved I’ve had 24 request to join emails for Etools and 30 request to join emails for AquaEd in just over 12 hours.

These are all from spammers. So effectively if it doesn’t slow down we’re looking at between 40-60 spam requests a day — which really is ridiculous.

There is an alternative to Ning I’m thinking that would be a better solution but need to ponder it a bit more. We wouldn’t have to deal with this type of activity and would have more control.

Lance.