Keskustelujen arkisto

Hi everyone,

Some of you have noticed some changes on the main page of this forum. I indeed recently made the forum viewable by registered users only. This was a temporary fix to prevent a problem encountered in the past weeks.
The very large number of spam bots targeting this forum is slowing down the whole server. This is a problem especially for coa.inducks.org which is hosted on the same machine, but also for other web sites.

As one can see on the main page, there are currently "657 guests" online. Most are spam bots. I took measures long ago to prevent spam messages, mainly adding a captcha upon registration to verify new accounts. I've also had all unverified accounts be removed after one hour. That worked nicely, however bots are "unaware" of these measures (which I coded myself by modifying the PunBB code) and so they recognize this forum as a spam heaven where administrators need to manually remove spams. So they keep targeting it, and although they can not send any spam, even their registration attempts waste resources and CPU machine.

I think the few spam messages that we have once in a while are the result of the bots authors, who check their scripts, or of people manually solving a captcha. Solving a captcha to send a few spam messages is clearly not worth the effort. Without the measures I took we would easily receive hundred of spams every hour!
On pages that I coded myself from scratch (on COA), where people send messages, I receive nearly no spam, even though there is no captcha to solve. This is certainly because bots are trained to target popular fora . Few people will spend time to program a bot that will target only one specific site that is nothing special.

To make it short: I am looking for a new software to handle this forum. One which will not be recognized as an "easy target" like this one, so that, I hope, bots will stay out of this server. Coding it from scratch like I do on COA would take too much time.
Unfortunately, the developers of PunBB (this forum) are not active anymore but I've heard good things about "SMF" (http://www.simplemachines.org/ ).
In any case, I will keep all past messages in some form or another. In the worst case, previous messages will be available in a specific part of the new forum.

Bye for now