Some Enchancements to do in the forum

[terremoth]

To the forum admins, It would be nice to:

• add a sitemap.xml for the forum, so Google and Bing can easily re-index the forum and its contents;
• fix email going to spam (when I created my account, the confirmation email was sent to it), so people won't have problems creating accounts again;
• try to update the PHP version and phpBB software version, if was not updated yet;
• set web.archive.org to index this new forum pages, so if goes down another time, at least will be cached the contents;

[Oobles]

If these are things you know how to do, please let me know and I can provide access so you can make the changes.

The server is on a Digitalocean droplet running latest PHP and latest phpbb. The other things I haven't touched.

Regards,
Oobles.

[mrbrown]

Hey Oobles!

@jbit, @Drakonite, and myself have been working on cleaning and blocking the spam that appears to have started in earnest last October. Today we discussed updating to latest phpBB but it's only behind by a patch.

Anyway, I'm up for taking on ops to tackle the items you've listed. This should allow me to write a few queries directly against the db to delete the spam in bulk as phpBB interface has a 500 post deletion limit per action.

We raised the idea of removing all accounts registered after a certain date. If we were to do so, I'd want to post a MOTD describing the actions with an apology if any non-spam accounts were swept. I haven't checked wbery board so I don't know if thwre is legit activity after this post. Thoughts?

[Drakonite]

500 post deletion limit per action.

FWIW the limitation is not actually a built in phpbb limit, but that the server times out when trying to delete too many posts at once. Worse is that a lot of the spam are single post topics from users with single posts, which means no good way to batch delete more than 50 at a time. It is doable but will make for a boring evening ;)

[Warren]

I deleted all of the spam users created after the site's resurrection (about 1000) except for 14 users since the site times out when trying to delete them and their posts. Instead, I deactivated them so at least they can't post any more.

Would appreciate any ideas of how to get rid of their posts efficiently

[Warren]

Alright, forums should be cleaned up now.

I found a workaround - since deleting posts made the server time out, why not try moving them? All of the spam posts have been moved into "The Incredible Hall of Shame", although we could move them into another forum and hide that forum if we like - there are only 14 users posts to move.