Just thought I would share, linkback spam out of control

The other night I was up working on some code when I got an email from godaddy that one of my databases was in violation for being over limit. Because the website in question is one that I use just for testing purposes, I was a little confused and so logged in to take a look.

Seems a couple of years ago I set up a forum on it to play with modifications, but never posted a link to it anywhere because it wasn't going to be used for anything other than testing. I made one 'test' post and hadn't been back since. I never selected to be notified by email of new members because there were not going to be any members.

Imagine my surprise when I found it now had almost 40,000 members!.. and not one of them ever made a post

I ended up uninstalling it which removed the database and hopefully took care of the 'violation'..

but really?!

Yep that is expected, you need to apply a lot of anti bot measures to get this number reduced but stuck with it in one way or another. But you can reduce the figure a lot tho.

this is nothing strange, add honeypot and math functions/CAPTCHA

Holla if you got any questions but i would assume that is phpbb by the looks of it.

About 5 years ago we setup a test forum to test all of our changes before deploying on the live site for one of the game sites I admined. We turned off all captcha and everything else for the site, and allowed posting. In the space of about 2 years the board had over 1 million users and about 10 million posts all from spam bots talking to each other.

hahahaha u serious, what a waste of traffic but funny.

Unmetered 100mb connection for a gaming site that had around 50-75 people on it at anytime. We had plenty free.

that's all well and good but your not suppose to encourage them lol

Yeah, if I were going to have it public or live, I would definitely have set some bot preventives in place. The one post that had been made was a test post by me that had no comment/reply permissions or I have no doubt it would have been filled with crap. There were no permissions to allow new posts, etc. on the board at all.

There has to be something good that comes out of these 'members' that join our test projects. I just don't know what it is yet. If only we could figure out a way to make $ off of them