Forum crash

[Erkka]

Seems like we have had a forum crash. I'm not aware of the reasons behind it, but luckily we are on-line again. I had to manually run some database recovery procedures, and seems like everything is back to normal, only that for most of the boards the "last post" column is empty on the index page. I hope it will get fixed by itself as the discussion resumes and new posts appear.

[Privateer]

a bot had posted to all accessible sub forums sometime yesterday before it crashed.
I had replied to one question, the question came back. The reply was lost.
The spam titles were all in foreign language.

Just fyi

[Sami]

Glad that you managed to get us back, Erkka. I also noticed the forum crash during the day, and now came to start working on recovery, but you already had done your magic.

This was an unpleasant discovery, to see forums fail like this, although web search results prove it's not a rare thing to happen.
Maybe spam bots did contribute to the issue to occur, as they aren't a rare thing either.

[Erkka]

I still think it might have been a techical problem somewhere in systems of the webhosting company, for in the morning the entire database connection was unavailable. That came back by itself after a few hours, so I assumed the tech guys at webhosting did what they could. After that a few database tables were corrupt, and I ran the database system's internal repair command on them.

So, yeah, it might or might not be related to spam bot activity. In any case, I don't know if we could do more to prevent spam accounts from registering without making it too unconvenient for real users to register. I think at the moment we have it so that each new user has to answer two custom questions - I have no idea how the bots bypass that, as I'd guess that even with a brute force attack getting two random words correct might not happen so often.

[Privateer]

I have noticed, though I don't think it would be a valid disqualifier, most of the spam accounts I've witnessed here fill out all the contact information ie: aim address, ICQ address, etc.. etc.. etc.

BTW Thanks for getting it back up and running