update: Guest permissions restored

[chluaid]

Lurker & guest permissions restored. See my update post below.

With hundreds of daily attempts by spambots to gain access to this forum and user profiles, I've been very tight with security.
For this reason I have closed off The Dark Hall to lurkers and guests. If you want to read or follow topics and posts in the Animation, Illustration, Writing, Music and Code forums, you'll need to register and log in.

This is a necessary measure to prevent attacks on the forum. Hope you understand.
-Adam

[Jaehl]

Why only the Dark Hall? 

[Mal]

If he did it to every forum, he wouldn't be able to make this message available to the guests and lurkers. 

[Jaehl]

...That is a very good point.

[chluaid]

XD

The other thing is that The Dark Hall makes up the bulk of the forum activity and content, where Scribble's Tavern is merely the antechamber 

[Markham]

I think you can create an extra forum/category with viewing permissions set to guests only that notifies them that they need to register to view the good stuff, rather than having it in the news ticker all the time.

[chluaid]

Update!
I've restored Guest and lurker browsing permissions for all forums, so if you're a Guest, you can now browse all the good stuff without registering or logging in.
A few days ago I had removed all Guest permissions for The Dark Hall because I was seeing several simultaneous guests with very similar IPs browsing forums, topics, posts and profiles. This got me all paranoid and security conscious so I banned the IP range and closed off The Dark Hall to all Guests.. at least until I could figure out what was going on.

I put in a support ticket with SMF about banning these guests from even viewing the board index. They responded, saying that it's not a spambot, the 'suspicious' guests are Yahoo spiders and googlebots. The problem is that the forum sees spiders as Guests so support directed me to a SMF mod called Googlebot and Spiders Mod 2.0.3 which separates the spiders from the Guests viewing online. Check out the 'Online Users' link at the bottom of the board index to see the mod working.
(incidentally, I've also installed a mod that shows what browser the users are running).

Unfortunately, the few weeks of counting spiders as guests has given us an inaccurate 'most online ever' count, which I hope to fix somehow, eventually


Resuming normal operations, unpinning this topic