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As you all know, each weekend, I make a backup of the database of this discussion board, as a safety precaution, just in case of a server crash, or a viral infection, that might cause us to lose all of our data. After almost four years of operation, the database has grown to a substantial size, so it takes a while to download, and, of course, the board has to be shut down while this is done, because a backup has to be an instantaneous "snapshot" of the data, (IOW, all the data must be in sync).
Normally, due to the new posts added each week, the database increases by an average of about 435 KB per week, (obviously, this varies, depending on activity levels, but the long-term average growth rate is about 435 KB of new data per week). Last week, the database increased by about 18 MB, (megabytes, not kilobytes). This week, it increased by about 18.5 MB. In fact, in the past 28 days, it has increased by 42.436 MB - a 48% increase in the total size of the database. It should have increased by about 1.740 MB, in that amount of time - that means that it expanded by over 24 times the rate that it should have grown.
Now I don't claim to be an IT expert, but it was pretty clear that something was out of control, and if corrections weren't made pretty soon, the database would grow to a size where it would occupy so much server space that it would become prohibitively expensive to maintain, so I checked to see what was actually going into the database. Sure enough, I found that the spammers had discovered the blogs, and were running amuck. Four of the blogs were not only viewable by guests, (IOW, the entire world), but they also allowed guest responses. One blog, in particular, had already received over 27,000 hits, and it had accumulated over 22,500 lines of spam, in the "Shoutbox". LOL. The responses to the blogs fared better, as there were only about 120 spam responses to them, altogether.
Okay, this was my fault, because when I set up the blog option, I left both the default viewer selection, and the default response selection, set to "Guest". Unfortunately, only a couple of us reset that selection to "Registered", (meaning that only registered and logged-in members could read and/or respond to the blogs. IOW, I have a hunch that most of us accidentally left the default selection, rather than intentionally selecting it. It's a real shame, but these days, you just can't allow guests to post, unless you're willing to spend most of your time deleting spam from your database. There's nothing wrong with posts by legitimate guests, of course, it's the spammers that ruin it for everyone.
Anyway, because of this, I've reset the default selection to "Registered", for both viewing and responding to blogs, and I'm in the process of deleting all the spam entries from the database. Now, if you really do want your blog to be viewable to the public in general, and/or you want to allow the pubic to respond to your blogs, you can still select those "Guest" options, and please feel free to do so. I have nothing against any member doing that, and if you want to do that, I fully support you, and applaud you. However, I would appreciate if you would PM me, or e-mail me, advising me that you are taking that step, so that I can make a habit of regularly deleting the spam, before it eats into too much server space. The vast majority of the spam seems to wind up in the "Shoutbox", and if you want, you can deselect the Shoutbox, (IOW, the Shoutbox won't even appear), by deselecting it in your Blog Control Panel, (Blog CP), while still allowing regular responses to your blogs. It's your option, though, so do it however you prefer.
I apologize for any inconvenience this may cause, but thanks to all the spammers of the world, if we don't take precautions, they will find a way to try to ruin our day, every day. At least this proves that the search engines are not only finding our board, but they are finding our blogs, as well.
I'm just glad that I figured out why our database was undergoing such incredible growing pains.
Love,
Tex
I would love to see imprisonment for life but now all prisons give the criminals access to computers. LMAO!!!!!!!!!!! So the death penalty would be more swifter and a permanent way of ridding ourselves of the problem. LOL