Forum Downtime

First Stop Announcements
#1

Hey guys,
As you may have noticed my forum was suspended by Hostmonster. Service should resume as normal now.

In case you’re curious this is what happened. Spammers registered so many accounts on this site at one time that it took down the server, so Hostmonster had to suspend the domain to end the attack.

Just having to go through hundreds of spam messages a week is annoying enough, I’m pretty pissed at these spammers now knowing that they can take down this site :mad:

Sorry for the interruption in service

#2

Thanks for your work to keep the site up!

Hey Herman! don’t you have some tricks up your sleeve to stop that crap?

#3

It is really annoying indeed to sift through numerous spam messages. Having my mobile number on my site, I even get spammed by SMS. (I won the lottery so many times I cannot even remember)

The only solution is to religiously keep up with software updates, and have a good spam catching mechanism in place. But even the more popular spam catching software tools are under constant attack.

By far the best solution is to write (have written) a piece of software that does the trick. (based on object recognition, some technical questions, or things like that) and not publish the software itself. That way you about completely stop the spambots. (most spambots just use the vulnerabilities of the popular systems, they do not attack unknown systems.)

I do have some ideas on that, willing to share them with interested people, but not publicly. (again for spam protection)

#4

I now got a plugin who doesn’t let anyone register for everyone, or anything, who goes trough the form in under X seconds. For vBulletin, works great.

#5

I feel for you man. And I do appreciate the site very much.

#6

Thanks for the suggestions guys.

I’ll hold off on any major upgrades for now. I think I’m gonna upgrade these forums in a year or so after I get a real job again, and it’s also my hope that the new platform will be better at dealing with spam.

For now I’m glad the forums are back. Hopefully this doesn’t happen again!