Forum updated, moved to new server

[admin]

Just updated phpBB software.

Still debugging the database memory issue. Looks like denial of service related to bot attacks. Please bear with us while we resolve this.

[jsburger]

Great to know you are on it. Thanks for your effort.

[admin]

I will be purging inactive accounts tonight. This should not affect any legitimate users, just users who created accounts but never logged in.

[dms8667]

Thanks for the heads-up!

Great work,

Danny

[admin]

A few forum policy changes tonight:

- Purged several thousand spam users
- Enabled google ReCaptcha because the PHP GD image captcha was not working. I belive PHP GD has been cracked
- Changed default user group to "Newsly Registered Users" (NRU)
- NRU group will have to have their first post approved by a moderator before they will be moved into the normal Registered Users group.

Mods will have to approve first posts of new users, so it's still going to take some maintenance, however this should allow us to be more proactive about keeping spam from cluttering up the boards.

[admin]

If any of our long term users here want to volunteer to become moderators, please ask. Mods will have the responsibility of approving new users and banning spammers.

@JPG thank you for volunteering for this. I approved your request (which I didn't see it until just now. Still figuring this thing out)

[admin]

All feeds currently disabled to disagnose memory usage issue

[admin]

More administrative updates:

Disabled memberlist.php entry script to debug database memory leak.

Purged approximagely 30,000 users who had created accounts but never logged in or posted anything (at least 99.9+% spam)

It is possible that some legitimate users may have been caught in this dragnet. If so, I sincerely apologize. Any legitimate users who were deleted are welcome to re-create your account.

Due to the excessive amount of spam we were receiving, I had to change the way new user signups are handled. From now on, new users' first posts will be held or moderation. Once they have an approved post, thy will go in the general users group.

We will still have to prune spammers who get past the CAPTCHA (now changed to reCAPTCHA), but their posts will not be visible to the public, and it should be easier to manage.

Also thank you to the new moderators who volunteered.

[admin]

Server memory issues resolved.

MariaDB had a huge memory leak which they introduced in a recent security update. They issued a patch

https://mariadb.org/mariadb-10-5-8-10-4 ... available/

[dusty]

If asked, I would say that right now the forum is working better/faster than I have ever seen it.

Thank you for all of the time and effort you have put into this.