Kill The Spambots

Kill The Spambots

Kill The SpamBots

For the past few days I have been working night and day to try and control CPU usage on the server. It has been slowing down things a lot. At first I thought it was the main Community, so I took out many of the queries for reminder services, raffle and extra things Members rarely use. I will bring reminders back, but not globally, only on certain pages. Nevertheless this did not cure the problem, so after making many checks, tweaking my.cnf and httpd.conf and still coming up empty handed I decided to do something unconventional... Allow spam bots to do their thing so I could see where the activity was had. Before I blocked spam bots, but blocking them from forms does not do much if they are still attempting to post, so I instead looked up IPs, host names and created a .htaccess file to cover it.

The other problem was some of our huge databases, not really the databases themselves, but the fact that with a harvest bot checking a database out several thousand times is going to cause problems. We still have another DB that is large and I am monitoring it... If things get out of hand I will make it a login feature for members only. I would like to thank everyone for their patience.