Flooded w/ Spam

[vegathechosen]

Yesterday my forum was flooded with spam. Ive banned the users and I've attempted to prune the threads/topics but it keeps timing out.. were talking a few hundred thousand posts. How can I get rid of these threads without spending the next 6 months deleting these individially? And what precautions can I take to ensure this doesnt happen again, never really had an issue with spam before and my forums been up for a decade I thought I had all my bases covered. But any help you can give is appreciated.

[Corey H]

• Enable Stop Forum Spam.
  
• Add reasonable security questions upon sign up.
  
• Display a hidden CAPTCHA.
  
• Enable Google's reCAPTCHA, you'll need to generate API keys for this, and it's free.
  
• Adjust Minimum Registration Time as needed dependent on how many fields are required to fill out on your board's registration page.
  

Using a little common sense with the methods above goes a long way. Use Cloudflare or something like it? Use the spam features that comes with that in addition to the things you can enable in your Admin CP like the ones above.

I've attempted to prune the threads/topics but it keeps timing out.. were talking a few hundred thousand posts.

Have you tried deleting the posts in intervals? Find a good amount to delete at once without it timing out and start there. It won't be as easy as selecting all at once and deleting but it shouldn't take too long either. Whitelisting or blacklisting specific email providers also works like a charm.

[mrdangem]

Last year I also encounter the same problem I also did this security measure.

• Add reasonable security questions upon sign up.
  
• Display a hidden CAPTCHA.
  
• Enable Google's reCAPTCHA, you'll need to generate API keys for this, and it's free.
  
• Email verification.
  

Now, I only one or two spammers in a week sometimes none.