200 bots a day now, and rising

[CraveNoir]

11,300 new forum members since 11th April. Today has seen 120 new members already.
Obviously most are bots as sign-ups prior to then were around two or three a day.

Is this a cause for concern? I imagine a spamming attack, could make the forum unusable.

[Colin_YNWA]

I spotted a burst of this a wee while ago and reported it (via House of Usher I think?) but alas at that time the admin-bots said they couldn't really act before posts were made to make sure they were spammers and no real mew members go caught in the cross-fire.

[Emperor]

I've never heard of a coordinated bot attack on a forum and I'd imagine they are all fiddling away at their own agendas.

I have previously noted it is possible to install a SMF plugin that checks Stop Forum Spam's database and kicks accounts that get a hit. into the "requiring activation" status. The problem is it would require someone to skim through these looking for false hits and there aren't many admins with time to spare, but then again you could probably safely ignore it as the SFS database is pretty solid (and the checks are on IP address, email address so would tend not to sweep many people up) - you could provide a link for people to email you requesting activation if they get caught by this.

[The Doctor Alt 8]

I've had the odd spam attack...

One way of slowing these down in my v limited skill base/ experience (and sorry if this sound obvious) is to place a time limit on people.... preventing anyone from posting more than once evey 60 seconds. It isn't fool proff by any means but it dose seem to conciderably slow attacks down.