MyBB Community Forums

A little over a year ago I installed a MYBB but never used it. I opened the file today and found 6 pages of posts (spammers all of them). I never advertised the site or forum and never approached the search engines yet for reasons I'll withold. But, how did all the spam ads find their way in. I'm getting ready to put the site in use and would like to find out if there is a way to prevent people from spamming me? All the junk was confined to one of the sample forums. The url for the index page is http://praisenpray.com/forums/ and for where the junk is located: http://praisenpray.com/forums/forumdisplay.php?fid=4 .I had recieved some notices about a security update but didn't have time to mess with it. Should I install something like that. I installed the board in October of 2011. Will I destroy the theme and decorations if I go to upgrading or anything like that? If the upgrade gets rid of the gallery plugins that would be fine with me. What is reommended? Thank you for your time to read this.

The update process is usually pretty painless, but you should always make backups before doing so. I have had to do minor tweaks after an update at times and other times needed no changes.

As for spam, there are many methods to help fight this problem, here might be a start for you.
http://community.mybb.com/thread-115774.html

as for how they found you, its simple. once you register your domain, the just check their DNS servers and look for new domains and then start scanning for links.

I guess it does add a touch of sport to things. I was getting about 20 messages/hour at one email address I used with the domain name and blocked it down to 0. What we need is some good vigilante bots---they would probably bring in UN peacekeeping troops for that one.

I made a plugin if you want to use, http://community.mybb.com/thread-128836.html .