Spwn'd

[Digital Jedi]

Last couple of days, I've been going nuts trying to figure out why my host kept suspending my account. They kept telling me I was slowing down the shared server and crashing it with overusage. So I keep requesting from them more info on what, exactly, was causing the overusage, because I'm pretty sure that me and the other guy who seem to be the sole daily visitors to my forum could be causing such an issue. None of my other sites run scripts.

After getting suspended three times in three days, I'm getting nowhere with feedback on what they think is causing the problem. Finally, after repeated posts in my trouble ticket (nice ones, mind you) I finally get the one guy at my hosting company who usually has an answer for me, and who usually helps me figure things out. He didn't have access to a lot of info at the time of night he contacted me, but from what he could tell, it seemed to be coming from my MediaWiki installation.

That didn't sound right, but he at least blocked my /w folder from anyone but my IP so I could take a look at it.

It's at this point that I even remember what cPanel is for, besides creating email accounts and getting to phpMyAdmin, and I check my bandwidth usage, I think, for the first time since I've even started my own websites. See, I've never really had an issue with traffic, so it's never been anything I've ever really had to look at on my own sites. Here's where it get's interesting.

Several months ago, I purchased one of those cheap .info domains for a website related to a yearly party I throw for us and our closest friends. I installed a SMF forum...and kinda forgot all about it. Seems I wouldn't have the time or dough to throw that party this year, so it went to way beyond the back burner. So imagine my confusion when I see that my .info domain abruptly start using 50% of bandwidth this week. And that my overall traffic for all my sites spiked through the roof, yet I haven't had a single new active member on my forum since 2008.

Went to my .info domain and low and behold, the website had 30,000+ members and 50,000+ posts. I sat there for a few minutes just refreshing the page every 60 seconds just to see each new thread being made. I was getting one to two threads/posts every minute. There were threads in the forum with 800 posts in them. I couldn't believe it. I was about become a Big Board owner.

Needless to say, I think I found the source of my problem and deleted the whole forum. Spwn'd!

[BirdOPrey5]

Reminds me I should check a couple of forums I installed I never check up on for spam...

[metalguy639]

Yeah same here, never thought about that happening. I usually try to put spam stuff in place when I install a new one.