Our forum is under spam attack again

[TorbenGB]

New registrations are temporarily disabled! Sorry, but this is necessary. I hope to enable it again soon, but can't give a date.

As I write this, there are more than 400 forum posts waiting for moderator approval. I have checked them at random and it looks like they are ALL spam.
At the same time, several hundred new users have been registered, and a random sampling indicates that they, too, are ALL spam.
Both of these numbers are increasing daily.

This is a situation that I cannot quickly resolve. I must take drastic steps -- either by doing direct database operations, by enlisting more users as moderators, by finding(!) and installing good forum plugins ... or by admitting defeat and let the hordes pillage our site.

That last option is really the last option, short of closing the domain altogether. I'm wondering how many users are actually still left, though?

I know the site gets a small amount of very specific, very good traffic. This is exactly the purpose of a volunteer support forum for a defunct niche product such as ours. But has the time come to turn off the lights?


Right now, I am not doing anything at all with the site. I hope to find time "later."

[ken gray]

I just perm banned some folks...will keep an eye out.

[TorbenGB]

I don't permban - I go straight to user deletion (including their posts). But continue permbanning if it's easier for you - every bit helps!

[ken gray]

but doesn't that allow them to create the same id and login again?

[TorbenGB]

I have no idea -- you may have a point! Then again, they are autogenerating things so it probably doesn't matter... :-/

[TorbenGB]

With any luck, the "Bad Behavior" plugin that I know and love from WordPress would also be available for phpBB so that might be a solution:
http://webmasters.stackexchange.com/a/55121/3241
http://projects.phsoftware.de/projects/phbadbehave

[The00Dustin]

Certainly update us if you give something a try, however, depending on how sophisticated the bots are, you might not want to publicly admit what you're trying.