Spam attacks!

[lisam]

Occasionally spammers will get mad when they're banned from a site and will launch something called a "DOS" (Denial of Service) attack. Basically they just bomb the site with so many registration attempts that they hope to crash the site's server.

Today, the lovely folks at 87.250.252.240 (a Russian spam site) have launched one on the Dark Del site - over the last two days they've tried to get in something like 3,000 times. I have now banned their address from being able to access our server at all.

Yes, I have that power. Fear me. 

[darkdel]

Pay no attention to that lady behind the computer! The Great and Powerful Wizardess of Oz has spoken!

[Ed Dempster]

Annoying, aren't they? I quite often ban the whole range. I'm not fussed about losing registrations from Russian ip addresses - I've only ever know one Russian who frequented English speaking forums who wasn't a spammer, so the ratio is many thousands to one against.

[lisam]

Yeah, it's annoying, but it can even go beyond that - these guys can actually kill a website.