Brewology

Brewology has gotten ALOT of spam in the last 6 months. In order to combat this some mods/admins made it so new members had to get approval before posting. This kept a lot of new posts from making it to the public and so it seemed like we didn't have any new real users (we had a decent amount of new ppl trying to talk).

The spam kept getting worst until phpBB couldn't handle mod/admin requests when going through the spam to remove it and filter out the real users.

So...I manually ran through and remove a gigabyte of spam. I deleted the spam users and all the posts associated with them. I also added some things to try and prevent spam.

New Users - I am so sorry if I accidentally deleted your posts and your accounts. Please sign up again and try again... I have some new stuff in place to help prevent this from happening again.

Old Users - Sorry for the lag... I didn't realize this was happening and I definitely should be checking in more. Hope you guys are still lurking so you can talk / chat / post in peace again.

Spammers - I hate you.

Well that's great but If I'm not mistaken, the last spam post I saw in this site was October?

Edit : Just saw your other post about the approval system.
Well, now that it's turned off, isn't there supposed to be a forum where spam is going to get moved to?

Spam from bots just gets deleted now.

pretty convenient.

Dig it.

lol

As we knew we wouldnt be around as much as we liked (College, jobs, ect) we set up the board so that a new post had to be verified. We thought we could stay on top of the issue, but when bad got worse and there were literally PAGES upon PAGES of spam we would have to single handily go through we gave up. Luckily Nik wrote a script and did other house cleaning to rid us of that problem.

EDIT- Which is why you didnt see a Spam post since October. Users couldn't see new posts. Admins/Mods were flooded with spam. So, you're welcome?

haha. i like the explanation. At the end of the day the fact you guys had them all sorted as to be approved made my life a TON easier... i just looked for those posts rather than all the posts. So, if this issue starts up again... switch new users to require approval and I already have all scripts in place to deal with it

Haha yea, well I figured it'd be better that everyone didn't see the immense amount of spam we had, but I got caught up in everything going on in life, and well yea bkf said the rest. I'm pretty sure thats the most spam we've had in a looong time, and a gigabyte of spam is a lot when your talking about simple text and user accounts! O well, thanks for the help monkey, maybe we can start picking up new users now :p

i hope so... any ideas?

Invite real friends onto brewology, and if we're all hanging out, we can call some of the older members like crait, airplane18, toxxy by facebook!

lets do it.

I have no real friends.
jk

That reminds me anyone have any idea what happened to crait? Did he just quit visiting the site out of the blue one day?

he actually just text me today.. haha, I haven't talked to him for a couple months.

oo tell him its time to come back

I doubt it, I noticed his signature has changed and so I opened his profile.
It said his last visit was the 28th of January.