Are we under attack again?

[brell]

A lot of new members all of a sudden and also a lot of preregistered/unvalidated people.

[Semi-Native]

I only noticed a couple of pre-registrations.

[RobSeegel]

We never stopped being under attack - it's a constant thing. It was only a matter of time before at least some of the attackers adapted to the new security thing I put up. I will take a look at it, and see about modifying the code to make it unique for this site, but it will only be a matter of time before that's defeated as well.

Unfortunately, that's the nature of security. The more security, the more inconvenience, and it's something that has to be an ongoing process changing often. I have noticed this for about a week now, and have been doing a lot of deletes.

[RobSeegel]

If it gets too much worse, I will re-enable the old captcha, until I get a better solution in place. This will mean that there will be two security checks, and it may confound the account bots for a while, but it will also prevent folks from signing up.

[RobSeegel]

I made a few custom changes to the code behind the registration. Nothing major, but now the spam fruits mod is unique to this site. Hard to believe that someone would care enough about a single site to modify their attack, but I have no doubt that it will eventually be overcome. Like I said, it's not a big change, but it is an easy change that I can modify over time to confound automated attacks for a while, anyway.

It will be less effort to modify it than to remove fake users.... I think.

Anyway, Merry Christmas to all Admins. My best wishes for the coming year (and the remainder of this one).

This change was a small gift to those who watch over the forum. I tested it out, and it should still work the same from a user perspective.

Rob

[brell]

Thanks for all your effort, Rob.

[Semi-Native]

Thanks for all your great work, Rob. And best wishes to you, too.