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Spam Be Gone! | mrsmiley { June 20, 2007 }

So as I mentioned I recently upgraded our CMS here at HBN. Since then, almost all the wrinkles have been smoothed out, and I'm prepping for bigger and better things to come. Since I was already doing back-end site maintenance, I decided to tackle our little spam issue. Read one for details...

I'm sure you guys have seen the literally THOUSANDS of spam comments we started receiving once this site got real popular. I've been sick of it for a while, but until upgrading, didn't have an efficient way to deal with them. Well, since upgrading, I have spent hours clearing out all of the spam comments, and here's the result:

Before pruning spam: 50,000+ total comments
After pruning spam: Less than 14,000 total comments

That means there were about 36,000 spam comments! How embarrassing! Because of this issue, I will be integrating a new comment system that requires you to register before you can comment. I would like to connect it with your forum account, but this is most likely too difficult. It would be a quick and painless registration that will keep the spambots out, and also many flamers who don't want to bother with registration. More info will come as I roll this out. Thanks for your patience with any downtimes that come from future site upgrades!