intermittent slowness

[otherpower]

Thought perhaps I would try posting here to see if anybody has ideas, and if perhaps I am on the right track about what might be wrong.  I am not clever with this stuff so I'll be looking for help to fix things, or possibly install mods if needed.

Our SMF discussion forum is new.  For the last 10 years or so it's been running on Scoop software, which was rather slow and hard on our server.  I hired somebody to move all the content, all the user ID's and all the passwords from scoop, into SMF.   It's a lot of stuff, more than 10,000 users and hundreds of thousands of topics/comments.  We went 'live' with SMF about 2 weeks ago.. and it worked pretty well/ran fast for about 1 week.

A couple of problems..  we started getting a lot of spam (even though I've set the verification image to be as noisy as possible and required users to register after receiving email).  We're getting several people (bots??) trying to sign up per hour which has been tedious for the admins.

A week ago it started to slow down intermittently - sometimes its plenty quick but other times its dawg slow and sometimes we just get 'cannot connect to server' etc.  Also - a week ago, some of the  admins started to ban lots of these 'new' members if they looked like spammers.  Our ban list grew to several hundred in the course of the last week.

We have also been logging a lot of errors that say stuff like this: 

'Sorry Guest, you are banned from using this forum!
SPAMmy signature'

and...

'Unable to send mail to the email address '

A lot of errors like these... many per hour!  In the last two weeks we've logged almost 500 pages of SMF errors.

So yesterday I banned new registration, Im pondering installing the mod that forces new registrants to solve a puzzle. 

I theorize that perhapst he large ban list that's appeared in the last week maybe part of our issues.  At any rate - I'm somewhat at a loss.  We need to get the speed back up (again - it's intermittent) and we need to solve this horrible problem of 'bots' registering...

Our site is here should anybody care to look:  hxxp:fieldlines.com [nonactive]

thanks!

[kat]

Changing registration to "By approval" might help with Spammers. Search the mod site for bot and spam mods.


Speed... You don't have a shoutbox, do you?


If it's set to "Real time", that can bring things to a crawl.


Chat mods can do the same, sadly.