a question for strongcomet

[zeebras]

as someone who frequents this site and posts on occassion, i have been struck by the huge increase in registered members. in the last two months, there has been close to, if not more than, 1500 new members, with new additions daily. when i see the names of some of these new members, and some of the spam postings in the past, i'm left to wonder just who these folks are, and is the site compromised in any way?

[strongcomet]

Thank you Zeebras for your concern...

This forum system is not top of the notch, and there aren't many security features (as far as I could tell).
I've managed to decrease the number of post spams, and there are lots of them which don't make it to the forum.
It seems though, that the registration feature is still not very efficient, and users are added daily.
I frequently go over them and delete, but I guess it's been a while since done that...

I guess I'll have to switch to another system, but I don't want to lose all current posts, so It's kind of tricky...

[zeebras]

it would be a shame to lose all the posts here, and i have to say you have always been very diligent in removing spam. there are no credit card transactions taking place, so i guess this boils down to more of an annoyance than a real threat. so, strongcomet, thanks again for your watchful eye.

[strongcomet]

Made some further inquiries, and it happens that there's a way to move to PHPBB, which is one of the most popular boards on the net.
It's a very long procedure: set up an SMF forum system, import all users and messages from this forum. Then set up a PHPBB forum system, and import the SMF data into it.
I've already done all that, but for some obscure reason, I've lost many posts from the 'Shipbuilding' forum, so I'll have to try and import that again.
I first started with the current system, because it doesn't need a database, but I guess I'll have to move on. I guess I'll be also switching the whole Wyatt site to a Wordpress system, which is incredible, and free...