Massive forum member purge

[DJ_Omnimaga]

Ok, so I am not really back, but recently my other site has been hit by a massive wave of spambots. Altough still 12 times smaller than our Invisionfree board in 2007 (and TIMGUL back when it still used InvisionBoard 1.3 in 2007-early 2008), 3 spambots registrations a day is still a lot considering all anti-spams we have. Then I thought about TIMGUL and remember Rob telling me about a lot of new registrations here. So I checked, and there were a lot of spambots registrations. So I installed an anti-spam that should hopefully block 90% of them. I also filtered these bad accounts. There was even a member who signed up 10 times under an e-mail like BathurstEmma@gmail.com or something like that, with dots in the address, so if you noticed the membercount seems to have decreased this much, this is why.

Also, *static.theplanet.com was banned as a whole, because of a recent invasion from there. Spambots appears to use this hosting provider as a shell, proxy or VHost to do their thing.

I also deleted the entire Trash Bin forum that only staff could see, because it gave 500 Internal Server Errors and was impossible to access, so this is why the forum post count went down by almost 5000. Now I recreated a new Trash bin.

This should help preventing some problems because anyone could click the spambot links and get hacked or infected by bad files they contain, or fall for phishing scams. This should also help preventing my host from shutting down my account if they ever noticed our database was filled with these links.

I will also probably scan through forum files and update some mods, in case they are outdated.

[Fear 2 Stop®]

Awesome...I noticed an increasing amount of spyware on my computer around the same time...makes me think now they are related.

[DJ_Omnimaga]

It could be, we never know x.x

I think if we don,t click their links we're safe, though, but many visitors might click them.

Also, DJ Dropping has deleted all member accounts that had 0 posts that didn't login for 140 days or higher. They aren,t really needed anyway since now mp3 attachments are visible to guests.

[Master Dutch]

Thats cool. Those hackers always develop new ways to get your shit! I'm glad you got proactive. I have microsoft security essentials installed on this computer. Its free and it works great with Mozilla.

PS if you still run internet explorer get rid of that shit! Mozilla is the best. lol....