Well, it's been a pretty busy 2 weeks. I've been occupied with helping a new customer transition to MPLS. It seemed like whatever could go wrong, did go wrong. It's all good now and the customer seems happy so life moves on...
I upgraded CACC to SMF 2.0 RC1 yesterday. I had researched this since I was coming from 1.1.7 and I wanted to make sure there weren't any big gotcha's. Well, that too went about as badly as I could have expected. It was very strange but simply opening the upgrade.php file would cause the server to run away with the MySQL process. It wouldn't take long to kill it good. I had to do this several times, changing things a little as I went before I finally managed to force it through.
Why not just take a step back and assess the situation? Spam registrations have been bad for months now. I've been clearing out anywhere from 5-20 bad registrations per day. I'm sure I deleted a couple of legitimate registrations in the process. In the last two weeks the frequency picked up to where it was easily 20 per day and maybe north of 40 a couple of times. This was sucking up too much of my time.
Thankfully SMF 2.0 has much better anti-spam capabilities. 24 hours later and I've seen no spambots get through the registration yet. I see them trying in the logs but the measures must be working. I still have some cleanup to do but I think it's coming along ok.