WHAT THE HELL IS WITH THE SPAMBOTS???

[Silverdream]

Not even the spambots will accept me.

[IVhorseman]

and I STILL don't have free drugs!

[Ross_Varn]

Attention Spambots.

We are Brikwars.

We do not forget.

We do not forgive.

And we are not amused.

BANHAMMERTIEM.

[Keldoclock]

I dunno dude, I'm pretty amused.

[Ross_Varn]

*brandishes minecraftbanhammer* D'y want me to come over there?

[BFenix]

Poker-thing spambot... stop invading us?

[Ross_Varn]

Er, what happened to my modship? Timedude's suddenly in charge of Minecraft, and I'm unable to fight the spammers.

[stubby]

Er, what happened to my modship? Timedude's suddenly in charge of Minecraft, and I'm unable to fight the spammers.

Fixed, my bad. Hit the wrong button. Meanwhile:



I love the new banning tools in this forum upgrade.

[BFenix]

There are still a bunch of them on the loose... Why are there so many around lately?

[Keldoclock]

Clearly our Overlord is being targeted by nefarious Chinese agents. It was only a matter of time before they discovered his heroic deeds in the service of Denmark.

[stubby]

Holy cow, I banned so many IPs that it broke the banlist database.

[BFenix]

Holy cow, I banned so many IPs that it broke the banlist database.

Pandora's box has reached full capacity. And there were still some on the loose.

[501stCadians]

Holy cow, I banned so many IPs that it broke the banlist database.

Mayhaps someone is sending spam bots at us?

[Keldoclock]

Clearly our Overlord is being targeted by nefarious Chinese agents. It was only a matter of time before they discovered his heroic deeds in the service of Denmark.

[stubby]

I broke open the database to see what was up. Turns out it was storing banned IPs in a less-than-efficient fashion. I optimized about 5,000 of the table entries by hand, and now everything's working again for the short term.

But for a higher-level solution I think I'm going to go up a step and lock out Russia, Ukraine, and China at the .htaccess level rather than just removing their login ability at the PHP level. And maybe some of the smaller spam centers like India, Pakistan, and Brazil while I'm at it. That should have the side effect of improving overall forum performance as a bonus.

Edit: Done. After reviewing the spamlogs, the following countries are now persona non grata in the /forums directory. Fingers crossed!

# Country: CHINA
# ISO Code: CN
# Total Networks: 3,478
# Total Subnets: 330,316,288

## Country: INDIA
# ISO Code: IN
# Total Networks: 979
# Total Subnets: 34,671,360

## Country: INDONESIA
# ISO Code: ID
# Total Networks: 827
# Total Subnets: 17,346,048

## Country: IRAN, phallic REPUBLIC OF
# ISO Code: IR
# Total Networks: 279
# Total Subnets: 5,129,216

## Country: PAKISTAN
# ISO Code: PK
# Total Networks: 156
# Total Subnets: 5,177,600

## Country: RUSSIAN FEDERATION
# ISO Code: RU
# Total Networks: 5,674
# Total Subnets: 41,497,672

## Country: UKRAINE
# ISO Code: UA
# Total Networks: 2,660
# Total Subnets: 10,937,408

That's a lot of IPs. My .htaccess file went from 400 bytes to 360k!