Have You Ever had to Close Your Board for Bad Reasons?

A lot of forums have options to temporarily close your board for reasons such as maintenance, updates, etc. But, it can also be used to close your board if you had a spam attack, flame attack, etc. Have you ever had to close your boar with this option for the reasons stated previously? And if you have, did you take any other precautions?

I've never had this happen, but I have seen it been done. Here is the story: A couple of spammers signed up to a forum I used to visit. They acted normal, introduced themselves and acted like goody two-shoes people at first. Nobody knew what they were planning. They soon started to get known as good members. That's when they made their attack. They posted tons of threads with spam and inappropriate images all over the forum. No mods were on to witness this. However, the admin of the forum was notified by email and logged on. He closed the board for a while to ban the spammers and remove all their posts. That's when I logged in. I was slightly confused at the board being closed, so I came back later. After that, many new mods were hired and many threads popped up everywhere concerning the attack.

Sorry for the long story, >.<, just had to tell you guys what I have seen dealing with this sort of thing.

 

I closed the board only once on an older forum because of spam. It was really bad there were like 2k spam posts even though my host said they got it all under control with the new anti spam script but well I guess the bots found a way to break that system.

 

I've never had t close a board because of the reasons you stated and I've never seen it done either. IMO, prevention is the absolute key for combating spam and that's the stance I always take - meaning my forum only ever got spammed once and that was by a member who had turned sour because wee'd asked him to stop advertising his own site everywhere.

 

Spam... seems to be the biggest problem for everyone, the only time I had to close my board temporarily was for spam, and I have had lots of spam attacks here on AdminB. The first spam attack had caused me to close my board as it wouldnt stop.

Other than that, I close my board for regular maintenance.

 

Yes, I've had to close PH to deal with a huge lot of maintenance (conversion from VB to phpBB3, and then got hammered with spam ) and also CT, as I'm sure Ashley will vouch for me, as I had to spend hours on end clearing up the crap and installing tonnes of mods to prevent them from getting in

 

I had to close my forum for a long period of time after been hacked, took ages to get forumotion to re add the deleted forum because they hacked my email as well.

 

I don't remember details too clearly, but I do remember the main plot of this story. We were hit with huge amounts of spam... this was about the same time that Forumotion forums were being targeted as well, and we had to close CT because we had to secure the place even more than we already had it. Sure, we had rules about protecting your passwords and stuff, but we had to take it a step further when we were hit terribly with spam back in August-September. We had one staffer who was a moderator at the time (now just a VIP as he stepped down a while back) say that he wanted to ban the person spamming because neither Ashley.S. nor I were on at the time, and the mod was kind of upset because he didn't have the required permissions to use the new One Click Ban system that came with the Anti-Spam ACP mod. Not a good thing at all and it was a lot of work on everyone's part.

 

Yeah I've been madly spammed before, I had flood limits set to the lowest on forumotion, someone joined up on about 50 accounts and spammed the forum as much as he could about 50 spam messages every 15 seconds and this was about midnight GMT, I was the only admin or mod so when I came back the forum had been totally spammed.

 

My community was closed down for about two days - as the site was hacked, thanks to my host. We then sent out a mass email to all our members, that way, they know that we're back up and running. That's the only reason I've had it closed down. We rarely have problems with spammers, and when we do, they're taking care of fast.

 

It seems like so many forums are closed for spamming. I would hate to close mine because of spammers. It might make my forum look bad (it already does. XD)

 

I also forgot to mention I closed AdminBB for about 2 days to merge a database into it, it didnt go to well as you guys read in the announcement.

 

Yea, I think that cost us a little bit of activity as afterwards there wasn't much to reply to

 

But I quickly got that fixed by posting a whole bunch of threads.

 

No, luckily I haven't ever had to close my forum for bad reasons

 

Same as in the OP - I have witnessed a bunch spam forced forum shutdowns, but never had to do one myself. Probably because my forums weren't big or popular enough to attract spamers.

 

I sold my football forum because no matter what I did, or how much I bowed to the demands of the members, they would constantly bitch and moan and it got to the point that I just didn't want to be around it anymore.

 

How did you attract that type of member base in the first place? Seems like you should have switched your advertising and promotion methods up to attract a nicer user base. I'm sorry to hear that though.

 

One time my forum was compromised and I had to shut down for one week. There was a massive amount of spam that came from out of no where. Plus, they were trying to hack into the admin back end. The whole thing was just a mess and then they just stopped. I still put in place all the security measures though.

 

I had never closed a forum due to spam but I closed two of them once.

The first was in my early days managing a community. I made a mistake deleting a IPB skin that was in use and this fact messed up the database, thus I had to close for some hours to fix the mess. Thankfully I had a backup but I lost that day's new registrations.

The second time I closed my forum due to change of plans. My community was somewhat inactive an not very inclined to participated at least with some feedback about what they were expecting to see or changes I should made. Closing the forum allowed me to weigh who was truly interested in keep the community up or move on. Sadly I have to start a different project upon this failed community.

 

One of my sites is a small community of about 200 people. A flame war broke out so I game everyone a time out and shut the board down for 24 hours. When they got back on, cooler heads prevailed, everyone agreed to disagree, and life was good again. That was about 8 years ago. If I did that now they would probably just not come back....too many options now.