Screw the terrorists Alan has won

_________________
www.spectrehobbies.com

Thats where it is at

After my last reply to them, they asked me for my Admin login and password so they could check the number of spam registrations and posts! So if they need that information to check things, then how can they make claims that we are having problems in the first place?

I have formally asked them to stop disabling our website for no good reason.

And I have started looking at phpBB3 in case I need to concede defeat.

_________________
Dagster

What a load of *something nasty*...

If they continue to harass you, is it possible to change hosting companies without losing everything?

_________________
Hmm... what would a chair look like if your knees bent the other way?

Yes, that is possible. But it's a last resort.

I haven't had any further feedback from them since my last update, but that's probably because it's the weekend. Should get a bite by tomorrow I think.

I've downloaded a copy of phpBB3.0.5 and will set up a test installation to see how easy/messy it is to import all of our existing data into it.

The articles, competition and album data won't be lost because it's not a part of the core phpBB and so I can just impirt them easily enough. It's just rewriting all of the screens to use the new 'phpBB' infrastructure (which is insanely complex) that will take a long time.

_________________
Dagster

The problem is now fixed:

Powweb
It looks as though coincidentally that your phpbb board showed up as possible spam via scripts that we have running periodically in the background.

The script works by checking the 5 most recent posts made to the board for spam words. If it finds enough spam like words then it disables the board.

In this case that happened to be true. However it appears to have happened due to some of the spam words in our spam list being used on your forum. However on your board the words not used in a spam context, the words just happened to be the same. I have corrected our spam word list to not include the words that it was finding on your forum. This will prevent you from having your board disabled again in the future.

We win!

_________________
Dagster

makes me wonder what the spam-words are(and which were used on the forum)

and heray for the good news!

I'm sorry to hear this Alan. I fear you'll continue to have problems with them when they do maintenance, unless your modifications to administrative access "fix" a bug in their maintenance. Perhaps the database shut down is an unintentional consequence of your use of the older system.

No, it's a keyword search their systems do automatically each day. It sounds a bit 'brute force' to me, but basically, their system counts the occurrences of certain common words in the past five posts and, when it passes a threshold, it flags the site as 'spammed' and sets the "board_disabled" flag to 1 (true).

Clumsy and unsophisticated in my opinion. But it's been resolved now and they have removed the keywords that caused the problems.

They won't tell me what those keywords were though since that would compromise their security, but I am wracking my brains trying to figure out what they could be.

No matter. As I said before, I customised the process of disabling the forum so you need to set more than one flag in the database now.

_________________
Dagster

Two of those key words are pretty obvious, "hobbit" and "dwarves".

Rob

Thanks...

You're Welcome...

I agree...

Looks great...

Can't wait...

LOL...




Bugger, that'll be me getting the site offline for a day now as they'll think you've been super-spammed...

_________________
Studio gaarew; Gaming armies, by gamers, for gamers.

Who'd say such silly things?

_________________
" I think I'm... quite ready for another adventure!"

Bilbo

It's a first time for John, that's for sure...

_________________
Does that pupil look like it was done on MS Paint to you?

Yeah, my list is more along the lines of -

Whatever...

Idiot...

I disagree (whether or not this is the case, but for argumentative purposes)

Looks [word deleted]...

I am less than enthused...

BFH... (Boo [word deleted] Hoo)

_________________
Studio gaarew; Gaming armies, by gamers, for gamers.

You forgot 'Shut up', you tell me that a lot John.

_________________
" I think I'm... quite ready for another adventure!"

Bilbo

Whatever... Shut up. Idiot.

_________________
Studio gaarew; Gaming armies, by gamers, for gamers.

LOL. I agree. Thanks for that list John.

Would be Interesting to see their spam dictionary though

_________________
[url=http://one-ring.co.uk/viewtopic.php?f=50&p=298502#p298502]Corsair's WIP Thread - 03 Dec 12 Update[/url]

Don't make me lock this topic please. While it's entertaining to speculate on the keywords that trigger a spam-alert, it's a distraction from the point of the thread.

_________________
Dagster

It is rather strange that a hosting company automatically assumes that the words are used in a spammy context. Don't they have a look at the site and its subject before they shut it down for a while? The mind boggles.

have they completely shut the spam alerts now? I think there's a host of dirty rakes waiting to take over..

No, they've just modifed it to remove certain words that get used here a lot. So the "Anti-spam-o-matic 2000" (patent pending) is still running, but with a slightly more accurate list of keywords.

_________________
Dagster