A forum that kept getting buried in spam

A Swedish learning community board across four years: an upgrade that turned out to be what the login failure needed, repeated spam waves, and a security option in the hosting panel that took the whole forum down.

The objective

The owner runs the community himself and isn't technical. The board went through several separate problems over four years.

First nobody could log in at all. Then spam registrations and posts arrived in waves, got cleared, and came back. Then the forum went down completely after he ticked a security option in his hosting control panel.

What I did

I upgraded phpBB, which turned out to be exactly what the login failure needed.

I recommended a paid spam filtering service, and said plainly that there's no affiliation and I recommend it only because it has worked on other boards.

When the spam came back, I found the filter wasn't running at all. The service had disabled it for that address, which the forum gives no sign of from the inside, so I pointed him at his own dashboard to find out why rather than reinstalling it blindly.

I said before starting that the existing spam couldn't all be removed, only most of it, so the outcome was agreed up front instead of explained afterwards.

And I brought the forum back online after the control panel change, updated PHP to a current release, and switched the spam filter back on, which the restoration had disabled.

The result

The board is still running with its filtering in place. Six orders across four years, with the owner coming back each time rather than looking for someone else.