Make sure you take away their membership!
Paulette

are these paid members ??? or just lurkers ?? who are they ?

BRB I have protection lol .. never use the internet without it ...I have never had any worms or virus that I can think of ...but I am still leary to click away.

Guys, these are not real people, these are spam bots.
You do have something called "security code" but obviously it doesn't seem to work. And you guys pay for software like that? I don't understand why the one who runs this place hasn't contacted Invision, that's what you pay for, to have that kind of support (well, at least for a limited time).
Also, what's the resaon we use v2.17 when v2.2 is the latest release. v2.2 might be the solution to all your problems. So who's the one who says that he/she can't fix that problem for more than a month now? Busy? Yeah, but if you're not doing anything it will cost time too; blocking members, configuration changes, deleting posts, keeping people informed, etc.

I use SMF on two of my boards and always have the latest update and never had major spam problems like this board has and SMF is totally free and reliable too (never had any problems and I'm using it for almost 2 years now). A comparable upgrade from Invision 2.17 to 2.2 doesn't cost me more than 2 minutes with SMF. Is updating the board's sofwtare really that difficult or, excuse me for saying that, are we just a being a tad lazy?
Btw, it's ridiculous that you have to pay $150 to get lots of spam, only 6 months of support and only 30 days phone support. Get rid of this piece of junk and install SMF and convert the existing data with the Invision 2 conversion tool and be forever happy. I'm serious... there is no need to have this kind of spam, Invision clearly doesn't deliver.

I agree with JDonner - I'm no authority on computers or software but I've never seen anything like this. It has gotten to the point of ridiculous. It really seems as if you are beating your head against the wall when there have been people who have offered simple solution. the moderators can not even keep up with it. I would like to know what is the motivation for not taking the advice? While you are scurrying around and trying to "fix" it, many members have left and will not come back because of the obscene spam.

Just my humble opinion.

None of our decisions concerning the spam have been made lightly. There's very experienced people working on this both at Drawspace and externally. Sometimes when you look at a situation from the outside certain decisions might not seem to make sense, but if you have specific questions, just ask. I'll give direct answers.

Admin....I know you guys are working to get rid of this problem ..it takes time I totaly understand that ...so we will wait patiently and meantime if you need help please just pm me I am here alot of the time .

While I can appreciate what you're saying JDonner, what you suggest is not at all simple. Drawspace consists of many different components, only some of which are provided by Invision (like the gallery module). However, by necessity, most of the site consists of software either provided by third parties or that we developed in-house. Each official patch released by Invision has a chance to break some functionality that these other pieces rely on, so we must test each patch thoroughly before making it live. (Even if we had gone with some other forum software -- like SMF -- from the beginning, we would still have these problems whenever the SMF team released a major update.) Keep in mind that SMF was still a very new and very much unproven product when work began on this iteration of Drawspace. We simply tried to make the best choice from the tools available at the time.

As for IPB 2.2, it turns out this update breaks just about everything. As a result we need to wait on updates for our third party modules and write patches for our own code, both of which take time. Besides this, there have been a rash of security problems with the new code in IPB 2.2, so we're in no particular hurry to upgrade just yet anyway.

I'm also not aware of any new features in IPB 2.2 that would alleviate any of the spam problems we're facing. I believe that the measures we have put in place now will significantly reduce the amount of spam that makes it through on the forums (please keep reporting anything that does make it through!). The spammers may adapt eventually, but for now things should return to normal.

Over the long term, we are looking to migrate away from IPB (mostly due to poor support response times and security issues), but for now we're stuck with it.

Hopefully this sheds some light on our decision-making process.

--Warf

Thank you for the explanation, Warf. This is much better than hearing "it will be fixed in a few days". I personally was getting tired of hearing that excuse when others were giving solutions to the problems. It sounded like admin. was stalling for whatever reasons.