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The spambots regularly do fill in additional information, such as setting their homepage as one of the links they're sharing and a little bio like this one...

 

 

 

They really are crafty little blighters, but there's a LOT less of them after the latest tweaks. Previously this top forum was filling up with spam thread every 10 minutes... now I can actually see real threads on the top page, almost exclusively so! :D

 

You can't see me :p

 

http://i28.photobucket.com/albums/c242/leikahboi310/cenahand.gif

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The forums have been worse than ever before for me today. Maybe its just me but I've gotten a half dozen (Internal Sever Error) messages today. Anyway though I'm not complaining it goes away after a few refreshes.

 

Definitely not just you. I've had them all day.

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Yeah, it's quite bad again today. At the time of posting there were 31 members and 99 guests at the site. 25 of the 31 were visible (so probably 6 people, including myself, are mafia game players who lurk down the bottom of the site anyways) and the other 99 are mostly going to be made of spambots trying to get onto the site. There are very posts actually making it through to the site itself now, but I think the bots are now eating up server time on the sign-up process instead, which is why we're getting errors. There are never fewer bots, just fewer ones that are able to do anything successfully on the site but they are still eating up the server a bit by trying to do things.
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OK, I did some checking on server traffic and it looks like guests are able to search - which causes a ton of traffic. I've removed that ability and we'll see how it goes for the next couple days. if it's still bad, I'll remove the ability of guests to see any forum.

 

But, the issue is now just guests logging on (mostly bots) and taking server bandwidth.

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OK, I did some checking on server traffic and it looks like guests are able to search - which causes a ton of traffic. I've removed that ability and we'll see how it goes for the next couple days. if it's still bad, I'll remove the ability of guests to see any forum.

 

But, the issue is now just guests logging on (mostly bots) and taking server bandwidth.

 

Wouldn't that be bad? That's how i got in the forum in the first place, because i was able to read it, not because anyone recomended it. And i read it for a long time before i actually joined. I'm sure i wasn't the only one drawn to the forums like this. Just saying...

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I agree, Shawn. I don't want to do that. However, if making people register removes the server load, we may need to consider it.

 

Hopefully, the fixes I made last night will resolve it though. Plus, if we did do that, I'd have a message saying that people just need to register to see the forums. There are many professional forums setup that way.

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There have been quite a few 501s recently but it's been ok today.

 

If spambots are that much of a problem some kind of captcha system must be in order.

 

Maybe we should use that for the first three/five posts instead of manual approval?

 

Because it is quite annoying having to make posts just to get past restrictions. :/

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My last couple of 'big' posts in my diary have been swallowed by server problems. They go through (despite a timeout) and show up if you look at the thread, but the forum itself doesn't update so the topic doesn't move to the top of the forum. I then have to make a second post (which doesn't show up until someone else posts) to bump the first one.

 

Am I right in thinking that the forum will update eventually and I could avoid needing to make the second post? It only seems to happen in the diary forum.

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I agree, Shawn. I don't want to do that. However, if making people register removes the server load, we may need to consider it.

 

Hopefully, the fixes I made last night will resolve it though. Plus, if we did do that, I'd have a message saying that people just need to register to see the forums. There are many professional forums setup that way.

 

So, how are the fixes working? I haven't had that much 501's in these last few days. I assume things are better?

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