Spambots! To Your Battle Stations!

[Karyl]

Hey moderators! Please keep a close eye on your forums. We've been getting a lot of spam lately and I can only delete the stuff in "my" forum, Finished Artwork. So please have a look and get rid of any spam in your respective forums.

Also, Spen, is there any anti-spam plugins we might be able to get for the forum? Something like Akismet for Wordpress, or summat? Maybe a captcha to enter before submitting new threads or replies?

[Karyl]

Hi all, just thought I'd update you on the situation.

Spencer is somewhat busy and with the amount of spam we've been getting, he's given me the abilities to deal with it.

As of this writing, I should have deleted all spam posts AND BANNED ALL SPAM ACCOUNTS. There were a lot. It looked like every account that's registered since April 4th, 2009 has been a spam account. Therefore, in the attempt of banning hundreds of accounts as quickly as possible, I banned every account that has been created since April 4th, 2009.

IF YOU CREATED AN ACCOUNT AFTER APRIL 4th, 2009, PLEASE LET ME KNOW AT karyl_gilbertson(at)yahoo.ca AND I WILL UNBAN YOU.

EDIT:

Also, we are working on implementing some methods to cut down on the spam, so sit tight and trust that things will get better

[Spenny]

I'm deleting some more tonight and trying to get akismet running!

[Spenny]

I attempted to update to the latest release of PHPBB3 last night, which is usually the easiest fix for spammers... needless to say for anyone whom tried to access the forums after 10 PM, it not only failed miserably but crashed the entire thing. Good thing I made a back up.

I then spent the next 4 hours trying to figure out a way to restore from the backup since I accidentally fried that, and then trying to find a way to update without frying everything, to no avail. I shall try again later! Sorry again to anyone who tried to get on the site last night.

[cacodaemonia]

Ack, sorry guys! I didn't see Karyl's original post, but I'll keep an eye out for evil spam. D:

[Karyl]

Alright guys I've come up with a temporary fix to band-aid the problem while we work on getting the next version of ML going.

I was trying to set it up so that accounts with less than 10 posts have all their posts go into the moderation queue before showing up on the site, but unfortunately we can't do that with our version of phpBB.

So instead, what I've done is made a rule required ALL NEW ACCOUNTS to be approved by an administrator. This means a lot more e-mail for me, but on the other hand, spam accounts are fairly easy to tell apart from real accounts (for the time being at least) and I can go in and spend 5 minutes a day deleting all the new spammers before they have a chance to post.

If you're trying to register with us, please be patient. I will keep an eye out for legit accounts and activate them as quickly as I can. If you suspect your account has been deleted, or you're wondering why it's taking so long for activation, fire me an e-mail at karyl_gilbertson[at]yahoo.ca and I can fix you up.

[cacodaemonia]

Thanks for the hard work, Karyl!

[Jodie]

Heeeey, Spenny! I can do the upgrade if you want. I have my old proper web development environment setup on my localhost again. I can install reCAPTCHA as well, which works much better than some of the default anti-spam measures phpBB has (I've been working a lot with phpBB since I upgraded one of my sites to it... I've written 13 custom mods so far as well, ahha). Just let me know, as I purposely didn't keep any of the forum's password/account information on my computer.

In other news, the forum is doing well enough (or at least has a decent page rank) for spammers to notice it. Three cheers for us! ^_^

[Spenny]

Good work Karyl!

Jodie- Right now its not wanting to upgrade due to some of the mods that are on the forum. I have no idea which. When you try to do the update it fails and crashes the forum. I wonder if you could only restore some of the tables from the database to the new install and not the ones that spazz out the phpbb. What do you think? Is that something you can handle? I think we're keeping the forum on this server for now though, if that's what you meant about your server. Long term, if we get enough users, I can imagine switching to a better server and allowing attachments.

[Jodie]

Yep, can easily handle. I can match database tables, as well as changed files, so upgrading mods really isn't a problem. Would be great if you had a list of mods you've installed, but it's not really necessary.

As for the server thing, nah, that's not what I meant. What I do when I'm doing major upgrades to a forum is make a local mirror-copy of it on my computer. Then I run all of the upgrades and change the database/files from there. Once all the changes are made and working, I upload it all over the old online version of the forum. It generally minimizes the site's downtime to about a 15-30 minute window, depending on upload speed. ^_^

[Karyl]

Jodie, that sounds magnificent to me.

[Spenny]

Same here! Lets do it! Lets try and catch each other on msn and coordinate everything. E-mail will work if we are horribly inefficient at IM as well!

[Spenny]

Hey cool kids,

So, Jodie has just informed me that the updates to the forum and the spam protection are now complete! Hurrah! And Karyl and I are almost done tinkering with a new design for you all to play with as well, which allows for larger image posts.

-S

[cacodaemonia]

Awesome!!

[Jodie]

Huzzah! Can't wait to see this new design too.