by brian » Tue Oct 18, 2011 10:38 am
That's pretty much it- the problem was that there were so many spam registrations (over 100,000) that the board software was overwhelmed. I was able to get rid of a lot of them using SQL, but something went wrong and the whole installation got trashed. The forum has been moved to a different server, with updated software that has better spam protection. The spam protection seems to work well against bots- there haven't been any automated registrations since I installed it, whereas I was getting several dozen new spam registrations per hour on the old board. (They're still out there though- when I logged in the index page showed 20 "guests" online- probably bots attempting to register).
The anti-spambot protection won't prevent human spammers from signing up and attempting to post, but that's a more manageable problem. Hopefully.