My Forum Crashed!

[ChatIndia]

Spammers or Spam bots attacked my forum. There were no active member so i didn't pay attention toward my forum. Spammers took advantage of it and tried to flood my forum with their links. Though their posts and threads were pending for approval they didn't stop their spam and finally my forum crashed due to heavy load of pending posts.

Now I am not recovering my forum cause i know that i can't run a forum when there are spammers all around. But now a more dangerous thing is happening to me. spammers are now attacking my wordpress blog. I can see daily 50-100 spam comments in my blog posts. Again i fear that my database will go under heavy load and these spam bots are decreasing my cpc as well.

just wondering why these spam bots don't attack a popular forum like 'x10hosting forum'. how you people stop them from spamming? They are so "innocent" that they keep on spamming even if the link posting is disabled. Is their way I can save my blog from crashing which i couldn't do with my forum.

Thanks!

[Smith6612]

At least for starters, somewhat difficult CAPCHAS as well as in the case of Wordpress, Akismet + Post Moderation helps out. My forum is configured, along with the x10 forum to present CAPCHAs to new members before they post for a certain amount of time, and to also require verification e-mails, a CAPCHA, and a simple question on registration. I've found that at least if a bot manages to register somehow, it'll get stuck on posting, I can see what's going on and can get rid of the spambot account. As for Wordpress, Akismet + Post Moderation helps. Akismet tends to be very reliable in catching spam, though it can be slow at first to catch it, hence the post moderation. While they'll still be able to post, it won't appear on your site until you approve of it. I've disabled account creation on Wordpress should they find that to be an avenue to easier spamming as well, and Wordpress can have CAPCHAs added to it.

As for a crashed database, if it's due to a broken table (probably a sessions cache table), often times backing up the broken database and dumping the contents of the bad table will get things up and running. Repairing it via phpMyAdmin is another option too. I've found these to work with SMF back in the days of MySQL trouble. Took no more than a few minutes and the forum started working again with no issues.

[ChatIndia]

yes there was email verification and captcha during registration but no captcha for posts. i think there was no option to enable captcha's for posts.

whatever, i won't recover the database as its full of spammers profile. i have installed phpbb now. There i don't find email verification option. from where i can turn this setting on.

btw, i am now using this service "Cloudflair" and i think its nice. I can notice the difference within some hours. I can even block countries by just typing the name of that country. I will block china and russia. from these two countries i am getting most spam.

[lcdps101]

use captcha

[t-e-d-d-y45]

If you are using a free forum softwere I would use Mybb and then download the safty check, which should stop spammers, or you could advertise your forum get it active and then hire Modorators.

Sorry about any bad grammar