Me too, @ArzuOzoguz123 is a spammer. And he called himself a professor.

Edited November 6Nov 6 by Otto Kretschmer

10 minutes ago, studiot said:

Don't reply.

PMs avoid the 5 post limit.

Hoho, don't worry, I haven't. Just reported it. But indeed they are trying new methods to get round the anti-spam measures.

Are there real humans behind these spam attacks? I find it puzzling that someone would put months worth time and effort to flood an obscure forum with spam. This stuff has been going on since July.

Edited November 6Nov 6 by Otto Kretschmer

53 minutes ago, Otto Kretschmer said:

Are there real humans behind these spam attacks? I find it puzzling that someone would put months worth time and effort to flood an obscure forum with spam. This stuff has been going on since July.

Tiny things please tiny minds.

But unfortunately they may also have huge effect on ordinary folks.

IMO the anti spam measures here are probably stronger than the average site so it may be that we are the test site for getting around measures at other sites.

It was dealt with very quickly this time.

On 11/6/2025 at 9:59 AM, exchemist said:

By the way, right on cue, here is an example of the kind of semi-plausible, but borderline necro, pointlessly content-free and thus suspicious, post from a new joiner (last one in the thread):https://scienceforums.net/topic/126922-url-shorteners/

Pound to a penny this entity will post a link with spam in it within the next few days.

I suppose one could argue that this type of probable spammer could in fact be weeded out by moderation asking, by email, for more information but it would be a lot of extra work, I should think.

And now the suspected spammer in question has just run up the Jolly Roger: https://scienceforums.net/topic/135719-sfn-migrated-and-upgraded/page/5/#comment-1303754

And that’s after sleeping for 10 days, mark you.

On 11/7/2025 at 12:08 AM, npts2020 said:

IMO the anti spam measures here are probably stronger than the average site so it may be that we are the test site for getting around measures at other sites.

... resulting in the site being inaccessible for a few hours around midday (WAT) when Cloudflare had a hiccough.

Edited November 18Nov 18 by sethoflagos

19 hours ago, sethoflagos said:

... resulting in the site being inaccessible for a few hours around midday (WAT) when Cloudflare had a hiccough.

Noticed that, I was worried for a second.

Delighted to see service is now resumed after the flood of bots.

I notice that the restored system once more allows me to use the Edit and Report functions from my laptop, a feature that had become disabled for some reason recently, though I could still use it from my tablet, oddly. Is the site using the same host and the same version of the software, or has either of these now changed in response to the incident?

Happy Christmas, all.🌲

35 minutes ago, exchemist said:

Delighted to see service is now resumed after the flood of bots.

I notice that the restored system once more allows me to use the Edit and Report functions from my laptop, a feature that had become disabled for some reason recently, though I could still use it from my tablet, oddly. Is the site using the same host and the same version of the software, or has either of these now changed in response to the incident?

Happy Christmas, all.🌲

Merry Christmas to you and everybody else!

3 hours ago, exchemist said:

Delighted to see service is now resumed after the flood of bots.

I notice that the restored system once more allows me to use the Edit and Report functions from my laptop, a feature that had become disabled for some reason recently, though I could still use it from my tablet, oddly. Is the site using the same host and the same version of the software, or has either of these now changed in response to the incident?

Happy Christmas, all.🌲

On Monday morning we were notified that Invision, who make the software and also provided the hosting, were kicking us off their hosting. Apparently SFN was attracting a denial-of-service attack that was costing them money to deal with, and instead of trying to filter it out, they just cancelled our service.

Dave and I thus spent some time switching to a new (cheaper!) hosting service and getting everything hooked up again. We're back, though a few things will probably still be broken from the move. I suspect notification emails won't be working right now, and I disabled registration for the time being so we can fix the email system. If you notice anything else weird, let us know.

(oh, and we already filtered out the denial-of-service attack, which involved several megabits per second of requests to the All Activity page)

21 minutes ago, Cap'n Refsmmat said:

On Monday morning we were notified that Invision, who make the software and also provided the hosting, were kicking us off their hosting. Apparently SFN was attracting a denial-of-service attack that was costing them money to deal with, and instead of trying to filter it out, they just cancelled our service.

Dave and I thus spent some time switching to a new (cheaper!) hosting service and getting everything hooked up again. We're back, though a few things will probably still be broken from the move. I suspect notification emails won't be working right now, and I disabled registration for the time being so we can fix the email system. If you notice anything else weird, let us know.

(oh, and we already filtered out the denial-of-service attack, which involved several megabits per second of requests to the All Activity page)

Many thanks for the explanation - and for taking the time to fix it so promptly at such a busy time of year.

But a bit disturbing that a little forum like this should be the target of a DOS attack. What could be the motive, I wonder? Disgruntled obsessive, computer-literate crank, perhaps? Or does some shadowy organisation take exception to political views expressed here? Seems hard to credit.

On the site functionality side, the move appears to have actually restored a couple of functions I had lost, so no complaints there.

Edited 4 hours ago4 hr by exchemist

Welcome back, and Merry Christmas to all.

2 hours ago, exchemist said:

But a bit disturbing that a little forum like this should be the target of a DOS attack. What could be the motive, I wonder? Disgruntled obsessive, computer-literate crank, perhaps? Or does some shadowy organisation take exception to political views expressed here? Seems hard to credit.

Hard to say. When I searched around, I found a thread on reddit describing an essentially identical attack (same countries, same User-Agent). Nobody's emailed us demanding ransom or anything like that, and it wasn't nearly big enough to actually overwhelm a decent server. Feels like the low-level background radiation of the Internet.

1 hour ago, Cap'n Refsmmat said:

Feels like the low-level background radiation of the Internet.

Still, this sounds like a DDOS attack, which is directed and not just background radiation from Santa's robotic elves eager to sell us Laplander porn or freeze dried reindeer steaks or whatever. It didn't take out other sites at random, did it? And it came a day or so after several of us had posted some highly critical comments on the Letters to the President (US) thread.

(Nothing quite as effective as shitty government to ratchet up Kafkaesque levels of paranoia)

This is my post (uh oh), and note the three following it, especially MigL's last line.

https://www.scienceforums.net/topic/135496-messages-to-the-president/page/4/#findComment-1305023

You see why I'm wondering about what @exchemist referred to as "some shadowy organisation." I agree with him, it seems unlikely, but still...