Spam bots and thread locks (old)

[foxfire667]

As of late our site is getting absolutely hammered by spam bots. Contacted Izzy, had a temporary fix, but apparently that fell through a couple days ago. Haven't heard anything from him in a few days, so I'm enacting a more makeshift temporary solution until this blows over.

All legitimate threads that have been created are now locked at this time. This has been done to force the bots to only make new threads, making it far easier to delete the content quickly and effectively when I can. As this forum is exceptionally low traffic for posts, this should suffice for now until something better can be done.

I apologize for any inconvenience this causes users, but I'd much rather miss out on a couple posts than have all the threads on the site turn into a cluster of spam whenever I can't check on the forum. This isn't something small, it's been a never ending stream of accounts from a range of IPs for almost three weeks now. It is getting ridiculous, so this is why I'm starting to crack down the way I am, because it's all I can do with the power I have. I'll continue to purge new threads as I can, but just banning / IP banning isn't accomplishing much of anything it seems. At the very least however, if you need info from threads it will be free of spam.

I'll update you if anything changes.

EDIT: It appears the spam bots have subsided for the first time in about a month. If no more show up for a couple days, I'll unlock things again.

EDIT 2: All threads have been unlocked again. Removing this from the announcement category.

[JunkoXXX]

I noticed there been a lot of spamming as well.
Science the other day made the server drop the other day. He did it by spamming the chat.(offtopic but needs to be known.)
There has also been a lot of spamming on the ZIV forums as well. I think someone is trying to shut down music gaming sites or such. I think there needs to be higher security on the site.