[July 3] Forum Maintenance [Finished]

[Plarz]

New User Registration Closed

I have turned off the ability for new users to register for the time being. We are currently getting over 100 spam accounts registering an hour, so to stem the tide for the time being, registration is disabled.

Sorry. Hopefully, it won't be for long.

Maintenance Today
I'm going to be performing some maintenance on the forum today, to update us to the latest and greatest release of the forum, and to install some new anti-spam measures to help alleviate some of the pressure on the moderation team.

I've been hesitant to update until now, because the ITL system is completely custom code, and updating the forum is a lengthy and painful manual process. However, the recent flood of spam registrations warrants the update and anti-spam upgrades.

As a result, the forum may be slow, spotty, or disabled/offline from time to time today. If this happens, just try back later - don't refresh over and over. I also suggest saving a copy of any posts or PMs before you click the "Submit" button, because the board be go offline in the time you wrote your message. Most browsers have a "back" ability, so you should be able to recover anything should this happen. If you do lose your work, I'm sorry, but... I told you so!

Feel free to ask questions here.

If there's a dire emergency, there's always the admin [at] bartertown.com e-mail you can use.

I'll update you here when I'm done.

Thanks for your understanding,
- Plarz
Bartertown Mechanic

[MagickalMemories]

It cannot be said enough; thank you for all the work you do in maintaining the site here, Plarz. We are a far better place for your presence.

Eric

[Bahamut_Dragonlord]

It cannot be said enough; thank you for all the work you do in maintaining the site here, Plarz. We are a far better place for your presence.

Eric

^ A thousand times this!

[Plarz]

Ok, we're all done.

Please post here if you fond anything that broke.

[porkuslime]

Ok, we're all done.

Please post here if you fond anything that broke.

fond.. .you mean.. you LIKE stuff that breaks?

lord I hope you didn't truncate that word...

[Plarz]

Ok, we're all done.

Please post here if you fond anything that broke.

fond.. .you mean.. you LIKE stuff that breaks?

lord I hope you didn't truncate that word...

*find

Who let you out of your cage?

[Plarz]

Ok, fingers crossed.

Here's what was done today:

• phpBB software updated to latest and greatest release (3.0.10 -> 3.0.11)
• implemented a new anti-spam measure on the registration page that involves dragging and dropping items into a pair of lists
• removed the words "e-mail" and "email" from the registration page, and the page's code
• added a code trap for any spam bot that isn't actually a human, that tries to use the registration page's HTML to fake a registration
• deleted over 20,000 spam user accounts (22,233 if anyone cares) that had registered but never activated their account, which cuts the number of users registered to the forum by a third
• made a backup of the database
• deleted the old database backups, freeing several GB on the server hard drive

And now I'm going home to have a beer.

[MagickalMemories]

[Plarz]

Found, and got rid of another 11,423 spam accounts.

/flex

Sent from my Nexus 7 using Tapatalk 2

[optimusprime14]

Found, and got rid of another 11,423 spam accounts.

/flex

Sent from my Nexus 7 using Tapatalk 2

Does that imply that 1/2 of the accounts were spam accounts? wow....

Coming from an IT background, doidn what you did was pretty intensive, so thanks, I know it was a good chunk of work.

[mysticarcher]

So as someone without much of an IT background will deleting these extra accounts positively impact things - I mean aside from the obvious not having spam posts will the board now be slightly faster or anything?

[Plarz]

No, it won't really increase performance, not in any noticeable measure. It's mostly to just free up database room, and keep those spam bots from logging in and spamming the board.