Site Maintenance

Aaron · Post by **Aaron** » Wed Dec 04, 2013 4:23 pm

FYI.

I don't know if you've noticed the site slowing down at all but for the last few days I've been working on weeding the bots out of the memberlist. It's been a slow process but since I started working on it we've gone from over 220,000 forum members (most of which were bots... from China and Eastern Europe) to just under 90,000 members (most of which are still bots... from China and Eastern Europe).

Up until a few days ago anyone who registered for this forum was automatically an active member capable of posting (or spamming) as they wished. I've adjusted one of the registration settings so that now upon registering the user needs to manually confirm their registration before they become an active user. This should help weed out the "autobots" from spamming the website. A good 75 to 80% of the bots that register are autobots. Most bots that register never actually spam the website.

I've also been working on banning IP addresses from Chinese bots. It's somewhat of a futile endeavor as there are thousands of IP addresses that a bot can use but it should help to slow down the number of bot registrations a little. The forum has been averaging about 500 bot registrations a day for the last year and the numbers seem to be picking up.

Aux-Arc · Post by **Aux-Arc** » Wed Dec 04, 2013 4:32 pm

thanks aaron!

lynda · Post by **lynda** » Thu Dec 05, 2013 7:41 am

thank you so much for your time

11Haniel11 · Post by **11Haniel11** » Fri Dec 06, 2013 2:42 am

Thank you Aaron. Great job. Finally the bot invasion is over!