Hello everyone,
I recently started a forum and I was trying to add content and generate traffic when I suddenly noticed that people from Russia and other countries unknown to me have started registering and have hijacked the forum and I don't know what to do, can somebody please suggest to me the possible solution and measures I can take to solve this problem.The forum is www.9jacommunitys.com

That maybe the work of bot spam.

You can put a captcha on the registration page to verify if user is human before registering a user.

Adesege:
That maybe the work of bot spam.

You can put a captcha on the registration page to verify if user is human before registering a user.

Thanks for your response. How do I place a captcha on the registration page and what do I do with all the registered accounts

keston57:

Thanks for your response. How do I place a captcha on the registration page and what do I do with all the registered accounts

Last I worked on SMF was some years ago. I will suggest you check around user registration settings or general settings.

To delete already created account, it will be easier if the user's id are ordered. That's we have ids 1,2,3,4,5,6.... 30 for example. You write an sql statement like this and execute from your phpmyadmin interface.

DELETE FROM tbl_name WHERE id>0 AND id<31.

id is auto increment and an index.

But if you have real users in between, it will be difficult using that method.

Hope that helps

@Adesege
Thanks for your interest, the most important thing is to confirm the authenticity of the registrants, to delete wont be that difficult as I can devote time do that. The most annoying thing is that they keep up making drug related adverts/links on the site.

keston57:
@Adesege
Thanks for your interest, the most important thing is to confirm the authenticity of the registrants, to delete wont be that difficult as I can devote time do that. The most annoying thing is that they keep up making drug related adverts/links on the site.

Well, I once had same problem some two years ago when I was running a blog. Though not a script, I built the blog myself. I solved it by putting captcha on the registration page for some weeks, after which i removed it.

You can have an idea of where these bots are coming from using Awstats in your host cpanel.

You can also block ip addresses you perceive are bots from the records provided by Awstats.

Best regards