Accounts Disabled

[KiTA]

Due to a rather stupid amount of spam from Russia, I have performed the following actions today:

1. Updated the forum to the latest version of phpBB.
2. Upgraded and installed ReCaptcha. This is the anti-spambot measure Google uses, that displays two pictures with words in them.
3. Disabled all accounts with 0 postings.
4. Disabled all accounts created after 11/20/2013 (there were about 100 of them, all Russian spambots).

I'll be keeping an eye on things to see if this spam stops. Everyone should thank Biv for keeping the site clean the last few days, as he was cleaning the site so fast I didn't even notice it was happening.

If you are attempting to login and cannot due to your account being blocked, let me know. It is easily fixed.

[KiTA]

So far tonight in the past half hour I've gotten a dozen or more new accounts signed up, all obviously spam accounts. To this end I've enabled a new spam protection system, cleaned up the QA questions upon login (and will be adding a few more in a second), and added an anti-spam mod that will help clean things up. I also went through and auto-deleted any accounts that had never been logged into.

Enabling the spam protection system immediately stopped the new accounts. If you cannot create a new account feel free to contact me elsewhere and I'll see about fixing it.

[KiTA]

A botnet has been hitting us since late July. About 1000 randomly generated accounts were created; most recently about 5 per hour.

I have changed the QA questions, which has screwed them up. So now we have ~15 of them trying to create accounts at a time and failing.

As always, most of us have moved to discord.

https://discord.gg/5YpdFTj