It’s nice to have many registered users. It’s nice to have them coming, joining and participating. It’s nice to have a raising graph. It’s nice to have nice users.
It’s not not nice to deal with SPAM. After the SPAM storm during the last two days, I finally looked into the user database and this is the result:
- Deleted 500+ awaiting activation accounts
- Banned 250+ users
- Half of online users in the past 24 hours were in fact spammers (if you are registered you can see their account struckthrough).
- 300+ profiles were thoroughly checked also against the “known spammers” database
- Upgraded the forum software
- Added plug-ins, tweaked configuration
- Spent more than one day of my life on that crap
Is it gonna help? At least I’ve learnt a thing or two and will keep an eye on more details than used to before. Yeah, more work, less fun. Speaking of demotivators…
Oh, yeah… If you find your account blocked and you think that it happened by mistake, or or if you cannot register, drop me a mail or ask in the chat.
Banned several dozens more.
The plugin seems to work. Since last night it stopped 48 spammers from registering. Of course, the database is never complete, but 48 within less than 20 hours is not bad.
I wonder what happened. What triggered that swarm of morons three days ago.
This was the main reason I don’t have a message board anymore. Thanks for handling the crap for us.
After 28 hours: blocked 120 attempts to register by 85 unique users.
Logs show that along with individual attempts there are automatic ones (e.g. every 49min).
I haven’t banned anybody since 10 hours ago and it became a bit boring, so I moved to the next phase – blocking by IP. Moreover, the banned spammers keep coming and show up in the “Who’s online”, what is annoying.
Thanks for curating your website. It’s a big demotivator when you find a cool forum that overrun with spam.
Next step: I begin to block by class C networks.
Just an FYI. the WordPress Akismet statistics: blocked 117,377 messages since Oct 2006.
I don’t know what people did before Akismet. It seems like a necessity for anything with a form submission!
Unfortunately, Akismet for MyBB is in a rudimentary phase and not currently worked on. It simply bans for no reason. Yeah, also a good protection, but not very productive 😉