Well, as you've probably noticed, those "problems" went away. After wrangling around with tech support - who finally insisted that the problem wasn't on their side - I was not too far away from this:
but in a last-ditch bit of intuition, I tried bumping the port outgoing mail uses - which is normally 25 - to 26 (the thought being that, somehow, somewhere, somebody was filtering port 25). Boom, done. Fixed. This shouldn't have even been a problem -- web server, mail server, etc. is all under the same domain, IP, etc. etc. - so there should be no traffic "leaving" allowing it to be filtered out somewhere. But you know how life is.
It going and inventing problems where none should exist, and all that ... hehe ...
so ... sweet ... problem solved -- just to run into another one. Sigh. Remember those spammers? The ones that were signing up fake people/accounts, just so their web addresses would show up in the Member Listing? Last you heard, I'd won that battle. I kept deleting every fake account that appeared, all but right after it appeared. After a day or two of this, said spammer(s) realized that the fruits of their labor had spoiled, and moved on. Well. One or two came back a week later, thinking I wouldn't notice. I did, and away went the fake accounts. Apparently this really cheesed the spammer off. Previously, the spammers were registering with fake email accounts, but ones that used real domains (yahoo.com, hotmail.com, gmail.com, etc.) Ones where they perhaps had a big list of names that their script would randomly pick, and attach to the domain. Before deleting each of their fake accounts, I'd ban the e-mail address they used. Their pool of fake addy's was thinning. I hoped. And apparently. Because Mr. Spam-pud re-appeared, and with a vengence. Suddenly, there were like 30 fake accounts. And the username was essentially a generated collection of random letters. No names selected from a list. Same with the e-mail accounts. each and every account was randomly generated on the spot. potrilc.com, wembw.com, lqgres.com, you name it. Now, banning was useless -- no name or email address domain was ever used twice. Hell. And Spammer had his script running on a timer. I'd delete 20 -- come back 4-5 hours later, and there'd be another 15. Mmmm. Death by attrition. Not good. My deleting them didn't bother Homey Spam Man -- he wasn't looking. He'd just set his script up, and walked away. D'oH!!!
I knew that this Forum software had the ability to do that 'visual verification' thing -- you know, where a graphic displays several characters, and you have to type them in -- but damned if I could find it!
And the fake accounts were continuing to
pour in. I dug, I dug some more, still no signs anywhere. Finally, I found out that that particular bit of code was missing from our 'tweaked' Forum theme here. Meaning, it had been there in the old blue/white theme. Another D'oH!!!
More digging. Dig, dig, dig. Edit, edit, edit. There, it's in!
(I've always wanted to do use that graphic ...
)
And from that second on ---- quiet. No spastic spammers. I kept watching. Still none. I checked back the next day. Not a single one. Ahhhhhhhhhhh....
Victory is mine. Greasy bastards!! (That's a baseball bat in the pic, by the way. It's from "Kenny Rogers' Jackass"
)
