this remember me the famous spam crisis we had years ago. oh god, that time was so hard that I almost fell into temptation and died missed into the links.
The only "good" thing is that it is usually one or two posters doing this. The posts are spread all over the forum making it look bad but deleting all the posts from that one person cleans it up.
I just get all the posts from the one person, put each one on it's own page and delete, click, delete, click, delete... etc.
So far the most at one time has been around 20 posts. We are no where near as bad as that last attack a few years ago. That one was so bad there were 20 messages popping up every few minutes. I think there were 3 or 4 moderators all deleting at the same time.
Whatever you do... do not respond in a thread posted by one of these arses. They are not checking or reading the forum. It's automated. they get "paid" just by getting links on pages. It doesn't matter if you even click on them I don't think. Don't PM them because there is no one there. No one's home.
Mike is looking after this forum. Moderators like me help out.
I've been sending the user name and IP addresses to him for the spammers. He is removing and blocking those names. I bet it would be ten times worse if it WAS being ignored. I haven't seen any spam for hours and hours. When it pops up and I see it I will delete it and pass on the info to Mike. I've been doing pretty good. I don't know if any other moderators are deleting spam though.
I can understand why Mike doesn't want to give some relative "stranger" like me TOTAL ACCESS TO THE FORUM. It would be like giving someone you never met but kind of know on the internet from some emails... access to your whole web site. I wouldn't do it. Maybe there can only be one "master" of the forum? Maybe the forum software won't allow more than one person with that kind of access? Who knows.
You never know... I could be some kind of nut job who has spent years mastering Anime Studio so I can take over the forum. It's all part of my plan for world domination.
Anyone want to buy some shoes? They are really cheap.
Seriously, I think that Mike should update the phpbb version to the most recent one. It is not needed to have the list of moderators in the footage of the forum. And the amount of moderators can be changed/increased by the forum administrator on demand according to the needs. I believe that delete accidentally a true post is less damage than have spam around. A forum with this dimension cannot be maintained only by one person. (Although we all know that Vern is plenty of capacity to manage this forum and ten forums like this, maybe sometime he needs his free time for its own businesses).
The new phpbb version has thousands of customization properties so there is not risk that someone ride the forum accidentally. Most of the actions can be undone. I'm administrator of other forum (synfig) but I'm not the one that receive the new users sign requests. So it means that there are administrator levels as well as moderators levels.
The data base of this forum is getting a little big and could take some time to migrate to the new version, but it would get worse as time passes by...