Spam attack - working to restore order

[ixnay]

Greetings, PBM community!  It's been a while!

I have had to deal with a new job, which has kept me very busy for some time, but there is now light at the end of the tunnel.  Occasionally I have been checking in here to see if anyone is posting.

Today I found the board had been swarmed by spam-bots.  I have deleted many thousands of spam threads and robot users (mostly using russian email addresses), and have many more to go.  I just thought I would clear out this one forum all the way, so I could post and you'd all actually SEE it.

I have temporarily turned off the ability to post here for normal users.  Once I have the spam-bots ejected and their droppings swept away, I will post here again and turn things back on.

More on PBM stuff after this excavation work is done...

[ixnay]

I got rid of "most" of the spammer accounts and their many thousands of messages.

I will hold off on re-opening the board up to normal posting until maybe late tomorrow evening.  This will give me a chance to hunt through the user registry and nuke suspicious dormant accounts, before they get warmed up again by the spammers...

[ixnay]

All spam accounts (and their posts) have been deleted.

I have also updated the forum to require that an administrator user (like myself) must approve each new registration.  Previously we just did an automatic email verification, which the spammers were more than able to deal with.

I have restored posting privileges to all users, so feel free to flood the forums with quality posts again, as per usual!

I will update with more on my end this weekend...

[Greybeard]

This is really good news, Grim!

[Davin]

Thank you! Thank you! Thank you!