SPAM

[Gaussian]

Some of you might have noticed an increased number of spammers on this board. It's the result of spam bots that automatically register on our forum without human intervention. This problem can successfully be solved by updating the board's software, but the problem is that the latest version is not a final version and I don't want to take any risks by exposing our precious forum data to any kind of beta or release candiate versions.

I will update the forum's software once the final 1.1 version is released which should be within a few weeks or months at the most. In the meantime I will keep an extra eye on these spammers.?

[Gaussian]

Originally Posted by Gaussian

I will update the forum's software once the final 1.1 version is released which should be within a few weeks or months at the most. In the meantime I will keep an extra eye on these spammers.

I have now updated the forum with the final 1.1 version of SMF. As of today anyone who wants to register needs to go through an extra check (image with a code). This will block any automated spam bots.
The update went very smooth and there are 1 or 2 little things that I still need to adjust. If you see anything that doesn't look right, please let me know and will have a look at it.

Note that it is possible that any spam bot that registered before the update, will be able to post spam. These bots will be banned and within a matter of days (weeks at the most) we should have identified the last few spam bots in our database.

For the last few weeks I have been approving every new member manually to avoid these spam bots, so needless to say that this update saves me lot of time.

I want to thank Pierre for helping me banning these spammers during the weeks that we were waiting for this update. I also want to thank those who reported spam posts.

[Gaussian]

Update: spam protection works, no new spammers have registered (used to be 20 day).
The one that some of you did see today was one of those who were already registered before the update of the board's software.

Btw, in case you wonder why we suddenly have so many visitors at certain times of the day, look at the attachment; just to give you an idea what kind of junk us webmasters have to deal with every day.
Guess which IP range I'm going to block on the server? Soon I will also reset the "Most online ever" counter, because 104 visitors yesterday? Nah...

[sPECtre]

Ah, ok I was wondering if we were on Digg or any other bookmarking site.