Hey, folks.
Just to let you guys know, we've been undergoing a fairly hefty collection of spambots of late.
We've gone through and removed as many as we find, but please bear with us if you run across something. Apparently many Simple Machines Forum sites have been hit by them, so we're not alone. We've added a mod which may give us some relief, but we'll have to wait and see just how effective it is. It shouldn't affect anyone already registered, but may make things difficult for new users.
In the meantime, your trusty admins (and the less trustworthy ones, like Darkmoon) are on the case.
It's not just SMFs. They seem to be all over the net. We've been dealing with them for a while on another forum, which is a vBulletin. We've even implemented a special infraction for them so that all mods can ban them on sight, added human verification questions to the registration form, and banned the e-mail domains that were only used by spambots, but they still manage to get in every now and then.
Another forum I run has been having the same issue during the last week. I've implemented and even harsher set of bans than what exists here on CMF (due to the more diverse fanbase we have here, we can't ban as many domains as I'd like). I also implemented the same mod over there. Hopefully we can get these spammers to fuck off.
Well, I'm thinking we should go through the list of all people who signed up over the last four days and check each one.
I'll make a list, in a minute, when I get my shit organised here at work.
Also - in some cases, legitimate posters are being caught in some of the measures that we have been attempting. If that is the case, and one of your friends mentions they've been banned, please PM one of the mods (llearch, Darkmoon, Mao and Tapewolf have been working on this quite a bit) and let them know.
Ah, yeah. Sorry about that. ;-]