There is a war going on out there.. and you are involved

[bringoutyourdead]

The battle front is the Internet.
The combatants are:
People who want to use the internet for what it was intended, the general good of all.
versus
People (and nation states) who think only ME ME ME. What is good for ME is all that matters, screw everyone else.

We had that flood of spam last year which threatened to overwhelm the forums.
We were able to clean it up and pretty much shut it down with the requirement of manual approval of accounts.

But over the last year things are getting nastier.
We are now at around +80% spam account starts.. i.e. 2 out of 10 new account starts do not appear to be obvious spammers right away.

This has been eating a lot of my time to check each and every new account.
After some discussion awhile back with Metalbeast I have been using the software ability to auto block IP addresses.. and ranges of addresses.

Normally I try to make the block as small as possible.. but sometimes like today I go nuclear.
I removed thousands and thousands of addresses belonging to Versaweb Inc a company that sells resources to spammers.

If you also had a connection via that company you no longer can get to these forums.

I have for some time been denying SpamBots who I spot doing spider crawling searches of all the pages on the site.
This is an activity that search engines use.
Public acknowledge search engines like Google, Yahoo, Yandex, etc. I allow as an internet service.
Spiders from unknown sources are almost certainly Bots looking for Vulnerabilities or exploitable User Information.

Over the next few weeks I expect that our IP block list will grow by leaps and bounds.
If they are IP blocked they can't waste my time with bad account starts.

I hope none of you are unknowingly supporting these bad actors by having your internet access via these corporate bad guys.. because when I get to those IP addresses your access will from those IPs will be gone!