Got heavily spammed today, need advice!

[matthewd5]

Hello

Didn't check on my forum all day, I got home and logged in and there were about a dozen guests

I immediately noticed that I had almost a thousand new posts!

It was an a-z of spam ads

I immediately shut down the forums while I irradiated the spam.

It grew to the point of 30 connections at once, they were coming from four or five different providers, including amazons hosting division...

I blocked the class c address blocks of the offenders, then I turned on moderation for new people...

I don't run my own server but the server I'm on has anti spamming software setup and it's active for my forum...

I guess I'm trying to see if there is something I could have done to minimize the chance of this happening again, and wish I could go back to just doing the email verification vs the fully moderated mode.

Matthew