Tag: spam

Forum, users, spammers, bans, demotivators.

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.

SPAM, blackout, overload, missing comments and captcha

There was another blackout. The official reason – excessive SPAM led to CPU/memory overload and overusage.

Not sure if it indeed was the problem (I think it was overloaded MySQL), but the amount of SPAM the site has been getting since October last year is crazy (see the graph). Blocking IP’s does help a bit, but I’m afraid I will have to block the whole Internet over a couple of years.

As you may have noticed, Continue reading “SPAM, blackout, overload, missing comments and captcha”