I had a work panic last month and regrettably didn’t visit the Mindmappers’ Forum for three weeks. When I got back, I found it had been taken over by spammers. I’m not sure why, because I was using an anti-spam plugin that had worked well since the beginning.
Anyway, I cleared it up in three stages:
- First, last month, I deleted all the spam entries,
- and set moderation on for new member applications.
- Finally, yesterday, I updated the forum software (it’s the excellent, free Vanilla forum), added more anti-spam stuff.
It’s now back to unmoderated membership and it seems OK now. There was one spam signup but that was automatically halted. Previously I was getting many per day and denying them manually. Easy enough, but a nuisance.
I’m left with one minor problem. Rather than manually delete each spam post – one by one – using the forum functions, I went into MySQL and bulk deleted in a couple of tables. That worked OK, except there’s a list of continuation pages at the foot of the front page, but no content for those pages. Somewhere (in the database I guess) there’s a note of how many posts there are, and it includes all those spam comments that I deleted. I can’t find where though.
If you’re familiar with the Vanilla Forum software, and can explain, please add a comment! Thanks.
Vic
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