Luftwaffe Archives and Records Group (LWAG) website possibly going down

[Dan O'Connell]

In an intererest this specialized, your research acquantices become very dear friends. You do what you can, if any thing.

[Richard T. Eger]

Dear All,

I couldn't agree more and for my friends here I am ever so grateful.

Let me bring you up to date on the current status of things. To begin with, I am not a website expert. I use the administrative tools available, but when it comes to looking under the hood and tinkering, I am out of my league.

Thus, when I have dialoged with 24hostingnow where the site is located, their suggestions, some of which I can follow and others I can't, I am left in a state of great hesitation, what I early on called the fear of pressing the wrong button only to see a small mushroom cloud arise from my monitor.

24hostingnow did what they could, but the spamming has continued. I raised the sensitivity level of the site's Spam Assassin software, but, in reading how Spam Assassin is supposed to work, the type of spam I am getting wouldn't be affected, which has proven to be the case.

I realized that I had a resource I had not involved and that was my son, David, who, himself, happens to be a computer scientist working at Google. Why did I take so long? Well, typically my problems have dealt with Windows and this is a subject that David has stayed away from. So, typically, he wouldn't be able to help. But, dealing with a spam attack and delving into code is actually something he can wrap his arms around and he has agreed to try to help. I'm hopeful that he can pull off a miracle. He's a pretty savy CS.

In the meantime, I continue to look at each registration, as about 1 in 10 or 20 is actually legitimate, and these I do authorize.

Failing success in this area, a stopgap measure would be to halt all registrations, meaning that the site would be read only, except for those already registered. I'm not sure we can do this, but I would suspect it could be done.

That's where things stand at the moment. This is a very pernicous spam attack. 24hostingnow has not been able to defeat it.

Regards,
Richard

[Richard T. Eger]

Dear All,

As I struggle with the spam registration problem, I find that I need the assistance of someone familiar with spam control in the registration process. The software used by LWAG is vBulletin. I am just now looking into the cPanel, but really don't understand it. If there is an expert in cPanel that would be willing to answer questions, please send me a PM with your e-mail address.

One possible method of spam control is cPanel's Spam Assassin. However, this appears to be directed to e-mail spam control and I am unsure whether it has any bearing on spam control in the registration process. At the recommendation of 24hostingnow, I changed the Spam Assassin setting to 3.0 from 8.0, a more aggressive setting, but to no affect.

Also, if there is an expert in vBulletin, especially someone who has also struggled and, hopefully, overcome spam registration issues, I would very much appreciate hearing from you.

The spammer pulled a new one on me yesterday, sending me a spam message in my private message account. This smacks of intentional maliciousness, rather than an automated spam for financial gain.

Regards,
Richard

[Richard T. Eger]

Dear All,

The spam bot has been registering about 10 times a day. Unfortunately, my son David's efforts, so far, have not yielded positive results. Thus, at least temporarily, I have halted all new registrations. He will be home for the holidays and we can attempt a fix then, unless I find one sooner.

Regards,
Richard