Site Maintenance

Greetings, all!

As of late you may have noticed, like me, that this site was getting extremely sluggish and painful to use. I had simply chalked this up the mercies of the hosting service and the growing backend database. 

But then I noticed something.....hundreds and hundreds (and hundreds!) of unapproved comments and forum replies. As you may know, only registered users are allowed to post comments or forum topics/replies. Guests may post on public-facing pages also, any guest comments/posts must be approved by an admin or moderator first. We were getting hundreds of posts by anonymous users with SPAM content that were not published (i.e., not visible to regular members) but that appeared in the approval queue.

The CAPTCHA system was supposed to weed this stuff out. Somehow, this didn't quite stop all the spammers. I'm guessing that with these hundreds of junk posts in the database, as well as the bots and crawlers accessing the site to post them, this was a major cause of our site's slow performance.

As a result, I've had to disable guest posting entirely. After making this change, along with purging the approval queue, the site feels noticeably faster. 

Though we are in the final season of MyForeskin 1.0 and have foregone major updates in order focus all resources on development and deployment of 2.0 (which fixes annoying issues like missing avatars and clunky old browser workarounds), we still need to maintain a usable site for the community. Hopefully this will fix the performance issues and keep this version of the site usable until the transition to 2.0 is complete.

UPDATE 1: This seems to have broken un-logged in access the Site News feed that is normally visible after you log out (it seems sporadic when coming to the site fresh without being logged in). We had the problem at first, then it was foxed, and now it's back ("Access Denied" block that appears). While this is regrettable, I don't think it's worth the vulnerability to anonymous spammers clogging up the database. As we are transitioning to 2.0 with a much better site platform that, this bug will not be pursued in this 1.0 version of the site. 

UPDATE 2: Seems everyone subscribed to the involved threads received email updates containing the said spam content. Major oops. Please see the bulletin following this.