Due to bots trying to flood the system, we're making, for now, membership to the forum invitation only. Please can you test this out and let me know iof it actually works...
These bots were taking down the server in a big way. literally a DDOS attack. CPU was at 800%, now it's back to 20%.
Cheers,
Marc
Post edited by DeerModerator at 2013-10-31 13:41:44
Yeah, I cleared all (spambot) applications last night, and by late afternoon today, there were over 6000 new ones!
Recently we have been getting about 1 genuine applicant/day, so hopefully with this invitation-only setting, very few would-be joiners will be left frustrated. So... good idea, Marc - cheers. (I wasn't relishing the prospect of going through 6000 applications per day!)
wow, the "who's online" is goin' nuts changing every five seconds with a different list of klsdjfhsoifdj usernames
so... a while ago i suggested that a north american mod be appointed to help deal with spam more efficiently. i'm not sure if the admin(s) saw it, and if they did, possibly they thought it was unnecessary. however i still feel like it might be worth considering; with both the mods commenting about poring through thousands of spambot applications, and probably as many spambots still members in need of deletion, i feel like at least one more mod (from north america or uk/europe or australia or anywhere really) would help lighten the carpathian and halloween jack's workloads
the invitation business should help with the membership application problem but as deer says, it's a temporary solution. and as ping pointed out, it means real fans with no ties to anyone here can't apply for membership, so it's not really ideal.
so, again, i don't know if my suggestion will be helpful or desirable or anything, and it's cool if not, but... i thought i'd say it
Sorry, I don't know much about these things, But what do these Bot things do anyway? Are they the reason that the "popular tags" menu contains only bullshit like "louis vuitton" "wife share" and so on? The "who's online" menu is almost exploding, I believe... :-S
yeah, they are. i'm honestly not super in the know about it either, all i know is they're not real people, they're automatic programs. they exist to... spread spam.
wikipedia says: "Other spam messages are not meant to be read by humans, but are instead posted to increase the number of hyperlinks to a particular web site, to boost its search engine ranking."
that definitely seems to be the type we get here most often. ~louis vuitton~ and all that