Aircooled Technology Forums closed, Tired of spammers, hackers and constant headaches! Options

[Jake Raby]

I wouldn't post this here, but I keep getting messages about our forums being down and a lot of them are PMs here. I figured making a post might clear things up.

I opened my forums back in 2006, we had tens of thousands of members and I shared a ton of our info there that I would not share anywhere else. The past two years have been filled with spammers, hackers and headaches that have pulled my focus away from other things, like updating websites, finishing my Porsche M96 Engine Bible and etc. The time to deal with forum hiccups simply isn't there anymore and it was time to prioritize where my time and money would be spent in the future.

I finally had enough with the last attacker and copied the technical directives and articles and then killed off the rest of the database. We will now add those technical articles to the www.aircooledtechnology.com website.

We have taken all links to the forums and have directed them to the Aircooled Technology facebook page, found here:
Aircooled Technology Facebook Page

We share more and more on facebook and post a ton of project pics there, as its both faster and easier than the forums, and we can still share technical data on facebook as well. The best part is its easier to manage and maintain security.

Maybe without the forums to pull me away I can even have time to send out more of our newsletters and those who were on the forums and want to stay up to date with all our cool stuff that continues to evolve can sign up here if they don't like to interface with Facebook.

Thanks to everyone who shared on our forums and took the time to become a member!

I just posted this pic of the 2.6 liter MassIVe engine in my 64' 356C Outlaw to facebook this morning. Its not 100%, but you can get the picture :-)
(IMG:http://www.914world.com/bbs2/uploads_offsite/scontent-a-atl.xx.fbcdn.net-1095-1380739861.1.jpg)

This post has been edited by Jake Raby: Oct 2 2013, 12:55 PM

[corsepervita]

Not sure what forum types you were using, but if phpbb2 the easiest way is to setup security questions and not use captcha. I had a database of random questions for registration signup on some forums I ran and we went a year and a half without spammers.

Generally with the new captcha stuff they can still get around that. However, using questions that randomly generate in your database work great because when the bots try and sign up on your forums, they create little automated scripts that just fill out all the data. If it's randomly generated, the script cannot always input the same data and be successful.

The other trick to this is to have non dictionary based answers and then put the answer in a specific forum or thread. For instance, put the answer in the middle of the rules before signing up. Put a special character in it, something along those lines. Example: "What is the secret answer to the signup process?" Answer: "airc00led for the win" or something when signing up. Or again, randomly generated questions from a database of 10 questions works great also.

Is it a bit more on the signup process? Well yes, but at the same time, since you can customize the answers and have non dictionary based bruteforce attacks or injections to get around it, it works great.

Anyway, that really just pertains to my experience with phpbb forums. Sorry to hear you're having issues with your forums. You really need to have good security or keep your stuff up to date since they find new ways around it constantly.