As many of you may have noticed, overnight last night we got a large amount of spam on our site. We use a service called Mollom (http://www.mollom.com) that monitors when someone tries to sign up as a new user, send a private message, or post on our forums. They have a large server farm that thousands of websites use to try and determine if things are spam, making a decision on if someone is allowed to post or not.
Sadly, last night their servers were having intermittent issues. I had configured the website to fail open, allowing all posts in the event that Mollom was down as we didn't want anyone to have issues posting. Sadly, with the Mollom servers down last night this meant that all of the spammers were also able to post. By this morning, there were about 200 spam messages on the forums, a small handfull of spam messages, as well as about 1,000 bogus users created on our site for the purpose of spaming.
Early this morning I went ahead and closed user registration for the day as Mollom was still having server issues, and then set about the task of cleaning up. I was able to get things cleaned up early this morning before heading to work so the site should be back to its reasonably clean self. Additionally, just a little while ago Mollom tweeted that their servers were fixed, so I have re-opened user registration now that we're protected again. If you have any issues, please let me know.
Finally, just in case anyone was curious, here is the amount of spam and ham (valid messages) that we have received over the last year. Note the ratio of green ham to spam, as well as the massive increase over the last two months. Recently (and you may have noticed occasionally that some get through), for every valid post there are almost 200 attempts to post something bogus. Thankfully Mollom and other items in our site blocks almost all of this.
For anyone that has any comments or questions, please don't hestiate to let me know. Thanks, and sorry for the inconvienience!
