So I've been running a phpBB forum for about 1.5 years now and recently I've started getting a lot of dickhead people trying to become users and posting spam to the message board.

Anyway, I try to keep the software up-to-date, but as of right now I'm a couple versions behind because I've got a lot of mods installed and the upgrade is quite a pain. I've had to turn on Admin authentication instead of just email auth, and still I'm having problems.

Today I realized that the last week's worth of posts have disappeared. WTF is going on? Has this ever happened to this board? Has anyone ever experienced this sort of thing? And if you have how do you stop/prevent it?

It's a youth forum with 45 users for crying out loud! Do people have no morals?

I'm not too familiar with the phpbb set up, but I moderate a vBulletin forum. All the users that register are activated manually, and closely checked (IP's searched, e-mail address/usernames searched on Google etc), and any spam-bots are deleted. It's a pain, but so far it seems to be a good way of stopping them. I think with a forum the size of yours you should be ok though.

Also, in regards to the loss of posts - do you run regular backups of your forum? A similar thing has happened before to mine (i.e. hundreds of posts have been deleted by huh-hmmm "half cut" moderators accidentally pressing buttons they shouldn't have ), but if you run regular back ups, you can rectify (at least some of) the damage. However, the problem could have occured at your hosts end. I know the last host we were with (<!-- w --><a class="postlink" href="http://www.asmallorange.com">www.asmallorange.com</a><!-- w -->) used to run regular back-ups on our behalf, so if they ever had a crash etc, they could restore things for us. I'm not sure if our current hosts do... If you haven't done anything which you think could have deleted the posts, then perhaps something happened to the server, which meant that the forum reverted back to the last time it was backed up - thus losing a load of posts.

I would like to point out though, I am far from an expert on these things - but I hope it's helped.

what site do you mod Ben??

MattyM Wrote:what site do you mod Ben??

It's a Manic Street Preachers forum/fansite <!-- w --><a class="postlink" href="http://www.foreverdelayed.org.uk/forum">www.foreverdelayed.org.uk/forum</a><!-- w -->

I techinically own the site/domain etc, but it's co-owned and run by seven people in total.

Cool... I'll have to have a look in mate!

MattyM Wrote:Cool... I'll have to have a look in mate!

Cool. :thumb: Don't be put off by the locals though - some of them can be a bit weird, but they're a nice bunch really.

Also, don't be fooled into thinking it's a Richard Hammond/Top Gear forum - there's been a lot of 'appriciation' happening for The Hampster recently. :? Much of it should only be read after the watershed...

The Hamster is a bit of a star bless him.

I must confess, I only own one Manics album, but I bought it on the day of release in 1996

Well the missing post problem has resolved itself. They all came back... so it must have been a server thing.

And yeah, I don't do manual backups of the database often enough. I know my host does nightly backups, but there is a service charge to restore it and it wasn't so urgent that I was gonna pay. I'm guessing that a number of different users noticed something weird happened and started complaining to the host, so they probably investigated and realized something was up.

Thanks for the tips otherwise though.

Give this a shot, <!-- m --><a class="postlink" href="http://bbantispam.com/howto/">http://bbantispam.com/howto/</a><!-- m -->