That's a really good point! We've battled it for the entire duration of the SWG's life. It was always poor Rhapsody who caught it because the spammers generally had Pakistani IPs, they'd hit us overnight, and she was the mod with the easternmost timezone. In fact, our recent email troubles was, in part, due to one of our forms being hit by a bot and generating thousands of emails per day, which led to overages on our account. (It was then compounded by a string of support people who didn't really know what they were doing and broke it further, but the original issue was the bot attack. We've since added CAPTCHA to that form and corrected the issue.) The stupid thing is that this bot wasn't sending us anything; it was just subscribing to the newsletter thousands of times each day, and the confirmation emails generated were jamming the system. The senselessness of these attacks somehow makes them more frustrating. I can understand the comment spam on the Heretic Loremaster trying to sell me erectile dysfunction pills and cheap NFL jerseys! This less so.
One of the fun parts about the kind of research I did to make the timeline (but also why it was so time-consuming) is getting to visit each of these old archives and look around. Some did indicate that they were having spam attacks; the usual solution to that was to shut down submissions. By this point, the archives were usually inactive anyway. It didn't seem to lead to the closure of any sites, but it did make their inactivity permanent, so to speak. It seemed to be comment spam; I didn't run into any spam fanworks (like what was hitting LotRFF under Keith Mander's fabulous leadership) in any of my explorations.
I'd say the spam issue continues to point back to making technical tools and education available for fans. While DW is battling it at a scale beyond what would hit an eFiction archive (or Drupal :), a smaller site is pretty easily protected, but you have to know how to do it. When Russa came on board as a mod, she knew enough coding to alter the eFiction script so that we had to approve accounts; that ended our spam problem there. She added CAPTCHA as well, which was our most recent solution too. If scripts were being kept up-to-date, they're likely addressing this anyway; Drupal has several anti-spam solutions (hence our email issue was easy to fix once we managed to talk to someone who gave us enough information to understand what was happening), and eFiction probably would have addressed this too if it stayed active. Alas. But fan site admins also have to know how to implement these fixes, which comes back to education and why projects like Fandom Coders are so needed.
no subject
One of the fun parts about the kind of research I did to make the timeline (but also why it was so time-consuming) is getting to visit each of these old archives and look around. Some did indicate that they were having spam attacks; the usual solution to that was to shut down submissions. By this point, the archives were usually inactive anyway. It didn't seem to lead to the closure of any sites, but it did make their inactivity permanent, so to speak. It seemed to be comment spam; I didn't run into any spam fanworks (like what was hitting LotRFF under Keith Mander's fabulous leadership) in any of my explorations.
I'd say the spam issue continues to point back to making technical tools and education available for fans. While DW is battling it at a scale beyond what would hit an eFiction archive (or Drupal :), a smaller site is pretty easily protected, but you have to know how to do it. When Russa came on board as a mod, she knew enough coding to alter the eFiction script so that we had to approve accounts; that ended our spam problem there. She added CAPTCHA as well, which was our most recent solution too. If scripts were being kept up-to-date, they're likely addressing this anyway; Drupal has several anti-spam solutions (hence our email issue was easy to fix once we managed to talk to someone who gave us enough information to understand what was happening), and eFiction probably would have addressed this too if it stayed active. Alas. But fan site admins also have to know how to implement these fixes, which comes back to education and why projects like Fandom Coders are so needed.