When this site was first set up I allowed for unregistered users to comment on the site, and well you can guess what happened next... if you haven't got it by now, then I can spoil it for you: SPAM! I then decided to counter this with only allowing registered posts and the spam died down alongside actual comments. User activity is a problem that all sites have to deal with, as the administrator is faced with a problem: enable unregistered comments or posts and face a spam problem that makes global warming look like a minor inconvenience? Or just get no activity at all, because no one wants to register for anything.

So I enabled unregistered users again and began a search for anti spamming and botting plugins for Postnuke. Here Bad Behaviour, Askimet, and EZ Comments came in very handy, and the spam levels died off again. Apart from the odd manual spam the site seems rather clean, but that was not the end...

Last month a fellow Moderator at the Phrozen Keep told me he could not download files from this site. Now I did not have a clue as to what was going wrong, so I just sent him any files he needed. This looked to be just a minor problem, but how was I wrong!

Now last week I find myself wanting to upload the next patch for the Ragnarok mod and am greeted by a big error message when logging in. Curses flew around and I decided I would wait until the next day and see if I could log in at University. After failing to access the site at University, the problem looked rather daunting. Until I hear about a 'crital update' for the Bad Behaviour plug-in. Lo' and behold the troublemaker was found!

It seems the Bad Behavoiour plug-in had been acting somewhat naughty. One of the blacklists used had decided that almost everybody was worthy of having their IP address noted down. You can guess the outcome!

You can not blame this on the authour of the plug-in, whose work has saved me much grief, but these blacklists really need sorting out. Many major companies rely on these lists and such a fundamental error should shatter the reputation of the blacklist at fault.

Just because things are back to normal, do not expect any updates, as that is how things normally go round these parts :)