I am sure I am not alone in finding rather wearing the extent to which this forum is now being hijacked by porn and drug vendors etc. And you Els must be tired of having to clear their entries!! The trouble is that, seeing this rubbish on the forum, just destroys its credibility as a serious location for discussing matters WHS.

I appreciate that miniBB as a "freebie" is only meant to provide entry level forum software and that they are trying to sell further features but I wonder if its provenance from Eastern European providers and some of its other "customers" (Their Web site glorifies in the fact that the "Latvian Girls forum" makes use of it!!) explains why it has been targetted by those from a similar part of the World? I also note with interest that the post titled "St Petersburg WHS at Risk" has received nearly 45000 hits - are those who are looking for forums to target (presumably they do this automatically via pre-written scripts?) using "key words" like "St Petersburg"? If so let's change them and try to avoid using them!!

I can't see any indication on the miniBB Website of how the registration can be made more secure against automated account creation, login and posting but I don't claim to be an expert in Web technology. If this is the case, I wonder if there might not be some way of removing the public registration facility such that anyone wanting to join asks Els who registers them herself? There is a fairly small "core group" of us posters and I suspect no enormous pent up demand to join the Forum in an active and genuine role so that shouldn't be too onerous and wouldn't preclude new genuine members either. And it may only be necessary to do it for a while anyway - no doubt there are other changes which could be made at the same time (e.g Forum name?) to remove it from the radar of such automated scripts?

By the way I would be interested in hearing a bit more about the nature of some of the posts - am i correct in thinking that the meaningless verbiage which some of them contain is intended to use as many of those words which are likely to result in a search match as possible?

I found this security warning re miniBB
http://secunia.com/advisories/30004/

And this seems to suggest that it is particularly susceptible to malicious attacks
http://www.webmasterworld.com/forum103/381.htm

Is there any possibility that these malicious posters can discover our IP addresses if we inadvertently look at one of their posts??

For now, I've disabled the new registrations. Let's see if that does the trick.

Actually, other genuine sites in St Petersburg and beyond which are very widely read have linked to the post, and that might in part explain the huge number of hits. I have updates I should post also, sent from St P.

The same topic is the most read on my blog also, according to statcounter. Other information and e-mails I receive suggest it's not all automated searches.

"Is there any possibility that these malicious posters can discover our IP addresses if we inadvertently look at one of their posts??"

Probably not at a post, no, but if you click on a link... the most basic and free statcounter will give all manner of information about those who look at websites with one installed. I doubt that having an ISP address alone will be of much value however.

Looks like the Hi-Jackers are back.

Perhaps this happened because Els opened the Forum for me? There seems to be a temporal relation... (and hopefully just a temporal!)

Yes it was - I forgot to close it again!
I have done now of course. There are no problems when it is closed.
During the past day no less than 25 spammers had registered!
Fortunately only 2 or so had posted, so I cleared them.

Good work Els.

Looks like the spammers are back again.

I don't even understand what the messages are supposed to do.

They are just a jumble of random sentences and Hyper-links. Very odd.

They are back as soon as I open the Forum a few hours to let a legitimate new user sign up. Sigh...

Yep seems like a spammer is back again. Nonsense about camels this time

Yeah, can't even leave it open for an hour or so to let a new legitimate user in

Oh well. Speedy work.

We enjoyed the pictures of the butterfly sanctuary by the way.

Thanks! I am working on updating this website too tonight (Mexican time). Finally I have some speedy wifi available (to compensate for a meagre WHS outside: Campeche)