AutoHotkey Community

Due to problems in our new forum setup we are unable to ban people by IP.
When we ban IPs we seems to hit parts of our own cloudflare infrastructure as well.
Banning IPs is an integral part of this forums defense mechanisms against spam - without it we will be unable to deal with the incoming spam.

Since we are currently unable to deal with spam we will have to avoid receiving spam.
This means we will disable the main causes of new spam - guest posting and new user registration.
This of course will only happen until the new Captchas are activated and the problems in our infrastructure are resolved.

Guest posting will be disabled later today and new users joining will be disabled in a week.

I'm also sorry for all the people that have been unable to use the forum during this time.

Guest posting has been disabled.

Dang i forgot about the IP code. That will be fixed tomorrow

Registration and recaptcha fixed

Has the recent rollback also reverted the recaptcha to a regular (easy looking) captcha or is it the same? In the last 24 hours almost a 100 users have been banned or topics manually disapproved. Sometimes more than half of the 25 recent topics are spam. Which seems a lot more that usual.

Otherwise it might be good to temporarily suspend new registrations again until it the recaptcha is back online?

Idk... whats going on...
Registration and recaptcha are both not working...
recaptcha is stuck on v1

nnnik wrote: ↑

18 Oct 2018, 02:01

Due to problems in our new forum setup we are unable to ban people by IP. […] Banning IPs is an integral part of this forums defense mechanisms against spam - without it we will be unable to deal with the incoming spam.

tank wrote: ↑

19 Oct 2018, 11:26

Dang i forgot about the IP code. That will be fixed tomorrow

I'm curious how IP banning works. That is, is a certain banned IP connected with the bad username(s) or is it simply blocked from any access (forever or for a limited timeframe)?

I'm asking because I'm in a relatively small range of IPs with my 3G modem and if some idiot in that same range spams the board and gets banned, on a new connection I may be assigned that IP and find myself banned or otherwise unable to access the board, wondering what have I done wrong.
Of course, I may disconnect and reconnect the modem, probably being assigned another IP - hopefully not a banned one - but it would still raise questions until - if ever - I remember about the IP banning system.

We apply both limited and unlimited IP bans. The standard is limited IP bans.
However if we get a lot of spam from a specific IP with no valid user ever writing from that IP the ban might become permanent.

Ah, I see. But are the bans connected to the usernames that posted spam or just to plain simple IPs?
I mean, if user 'xyzabc' spammed from IP address 123.456.789.012 and that IP was banned, and then another user 'AAAbbbCCC' tries to log in from the same IP, would the latter succeed or would they still be locked out (temporarily or forever)? That is my main concern.

We ban e-Mail, username and IP.

Well, then I believe I'm safe. Thank you for putting my mind at ease.