Account suspended???

[kanno]

So recently my account pflx.x10host.com has been suspended for the reason: "admistrative suspension" which means absolutely nothing to me. I thought maybe it was because I didn't log in for a while but nope still its suspended. (and I still don't know why)

I have already appealed my suspension and got no response. Any help to unwrap this mystery would be great.

 

[descalzo]

The preliminary report I can see is "Unmonitored spam forum" - which usually means that your forum has been spammed and you have not cleaned it up.
The response to your appeal should have more details.

But some general points:
1. Use plugins that use things like CAPTCHA to prevent spambots to eliminate much of the spam
2. Actually check your forum periodically to see that it is not overrun with spam. It is your responsibility to keep your site maintained.

 

[kanno]

Excellent, thanks for the reply! I have been maintaining my forum but well not so much recently. It seems difficult to deal with, I have a very large IP ban list which gets added to all the time.

Im not an experienced forum moderator but im willing to learn.

 

[Livewire]

Pinged an admin, for some reason this didn't show up in the dispute system. For now I'll work the dispute here; as already clarified there's a forum on the account that's been overrun with spam, which is causing high CPU/MySQL utilization due to the repeated hits. We can lift the suspension, but you'll need to go in and clean up the forums and take measures to prevent the bots from being able to register and post in the future; if you're not able to fix them at the moment, disabling them would work for the time-being as well.

Knowing there's been a delay already I'm lifting the suspension now, but I'm going to set the permissions on the forum folder to 000 - you will need to change them back to 755 when you're ready to work on them, as the folder won't be accessible until then.

 

[kanno]

Thank you!
That is a good measure to take since really I would only be able to tackle it after work.

 

[dattechx]

All you have to do is make it so they have to be verified by the owner to finish making their account

 

[Livewire]

All you have to do is make it so they have to be verified by the owner to finish making their account

Many bot nets now also handle the automatic registration of throwaway email accounts or already have a pool of emails that exist for them to use during signup; email verification will stop the crappy nets, but the better bots will be hindered only as long as it takes for the email to arrive. While it does help, alone it won't be enough, so captchas and other systems should also be employed. Nothing's perfect though, you'll still undoubtedly have to ban a few by hand, but the difference there is whether you have to ban 2,000 a day or 2.

Not that email verification should be ignored at all, but alone it's not the end-all solution like it used to be, especially with the number of disposable email providers out there, including the 10-minute-anonymous-email clones that literally require nothing beyond the name of the email account you'd like to create - those can be botted even by someone with barely any experience.

 

[dattechx]

What about the admin having to approve the account manually to be able to post or make an account?

 

[Livewire]

That would work, although if you're getting a ton of bot-signups daily most forums will still send the "your account is awaiting admin approval" email, along with the MySQL hits to add the user to the database. Plus you'd still have to deny them afterward. If it's a low number of bots though, that would prevent the spam itself, but most of the attacks we've been seeing lately aren't a handful of bots

 

[kanno]

Right everything is cleaned up for the most part, phpBB is upgraded to the latest version and I changed the signup process to be a little more difficult.

Only problem is I have posts which I can't delete apparently posted by "Guest" which shouldn't even be possible. I can't delete the user because

The requested user does not exist.

and the topic says

The requested topic does not exist.

.

I tried to re-synchronize the thread but the posts are still there. How can I resolve this?

 

[kanno]

Never mind, all sorted thanks to phpMyAdmin.