FORUM : Temporary block on email addresses from hotmail yahoo and outlook.

[swirt]

Hi All,
We have been under some heavy bot attack for the past several days from bots that are setting up bogus accounts with bogus email addresses. To slow the advance I am temporarily blocking new accounts for any email addresses from @hotmail.com and @outlook.com.
I do not expect this attack to go on for more than a week or two. After that I will lift the blocks on those email addresses. If you know of a human that is trying to create an account and can't due to the temporary block, let me know and I can get them in.

 

[Aspiring Martha]

I noticed the past few days that we had a lot more guests online here than I have seen before. Yesterday, there were over 500. Have I just not been online at the right time or is that unusual?

 

[Morticia]

Thanks oh fearless leader!

 

[Morticia]

I noticed the past few days that we had a lot more guests online here than I have seen before. Yesterday, there were over 500. Have I just not been online at the right time or is that unusual?.

I noticed the past few days that we had a lot more guests online here than I have seen before. Yesterday, there were over 500. Have I just not been online at the right time or is that unusual?

Guests are sometimes regular users (like me) who never log out. If you're logged in, but inactive (not clicking anything or responding) you will be in the guest list rather than being counted as active.
But yeah, 500 guests? Probably not unless they were searching for something and up popped the forum with that topic.

 

[Lee2014]

Thank you Swirt!!!!!

 

[Samster]

Swirt to the rescue! Thanks!!

 

[swirt]

I pulled down the blocks on hotmail.com, outlook.com, and yahoo.com and literally the bots are creating accounts faster than 1 per minute. Sooooo I put the blocks in place again to buy me some time to implement a better solution. This site is running on outdated tech and I just need to update it, but do not have the time at the moment.
If you know of or hear of anyone that is locked out, let me know specifically who it is by username or email address and I can whitelist them in.

 

[swirt]

I just threw in random (meaning it rotates them) captcha on a bunch of forms. Other than the login form you should only have to beat the captcha once per form type. If you are seeing any odd behavior, let me know.