Upgrading forum

[El Gordo]

Sorry MLCMM, Tom / All. I have to take the rap on that one. (And it should now be fixed.)

In brief, here's the reason for the recent talk about moving:

I've had a major problem in recent weeks/months with spam bots signing up. The weird thing is that these IDs are not being used to post spam messages, as happened in the past. I don't know what the thinking is, or what they are doing, but these bogus registrations have been running at up to 100 a day. There are supposed to be safeguards against this sort of thing but somehow, they've got round them. I've been deleting chunks of them when I can.

Just recently the bandwidth has shot up to ludicrous levels -- 20GB a month or thereabouts, which for a relatively little-used forum makes no sense. So I've been trying all sorts of things, none of which had worked. In a moment of desperation last week I changed a number of settings, which included code in signatures. I meant it as an anti-spam measure as bots often create accounts with links in signatures to get picked up SEO tools etc. I momentarily forgot that we use this too. Sorry. I've turned these back on.

The good news is that I think I may have sorted out the registration problem by installing another barrier. So far, so good, but I'm only 18 hours or so into the new configuration. No registrations in that period, unusually -- though these nasty people have a habit of rapidly finding ways around the latest obstacle. We'll see.

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Edit: Well, I spoke too soon. I've just had another 60-odd registrations. Nearly all are from Hotmail accounts, so I've now banned Hotmail registrations to see if that works. If it doesn't, then.... erm, I'll let you know.