You owned and operated a forum that was under constant attack by spammers and eventually the spammers gained a foothold and you started to lose the battle quite badly?
Would you keep fighting it by any means or would you just terminate the forum from existence?
If my forum (with anti-spam measures) was getting over run, I'd:
- Disable any guest-friendly sections. (To make it harder for spam to get in.)
- Temporarily disable registrations. (I wouldn't give a date when they'd be open again, but I'd explain why the registrations were temporarily closed.)
- Ban any current spammers. (This way it stems the flow of spam and makes it easier for the next step.)
- Clean up any existing spam.
- Start looking at my existing anti-spam solutions to see if I could tighten them up or improve them somehow. Possibly look to see what other admins have/are using to see what kind of success they're having.
Ultimately I'd see if I could add another layer of security (maybe a mod to block IPs from known spammer regions) or a different/upgraded captcha-type or another anti-spam system.
- After getting any new systems installed I'd open the registrations up and see what happens. Then I'd monitor and make changes to try to keep the spam off site.
I certainly wouldn't give up a forum I liked just because it was getting a bit of spam.
I'm not exactly sure what it would be when we lost a battle against automated spam bots... Meaning real members become lazy to visit because they see too many spams? Otherwise I'll do my best to clean up the mess, contact all moderators and administrators, and notify members about it. I agree with VirusZero that giving up because automated spams doesn't sound good.
