I think the captcha for registration needs to be changed so that it is more difficult for bots than just an image with letters. I'm not very familiar with this forum software, but perhaps you could set up a blacklist that automatically deletes posts with links to Temu, AliExpress, etc. I would also add a URL shortener to that so that the blacklist cannot be circumvented.

Adventure-treff.de also had a problem with this, but they managed to get it under control. Perhaps you should seek advice there. E-Mail: verein at adventure-treff punkt de

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Adventure-treff.de also had a problem with this, but they managed to get it under control. Perhaps you should seek advice there. E-Mail: verein at adventure-treff.de

It's definitely annoying, but these things tend to come in waves. We'll see what we can do to plug some gaps, but aggressive anti-spam measures tend to cause problems of their own.

At Mystery Manor, we had it so bad that we were getting daily DDOS. We were able to get them under control using a combination of Cloudflare, a captcha that is a little sorting puzzle, moving to a more modern server host, and new user moderation. (That last is not my choice, but it’s also not my website.) I’d say the Cloudflare was the biggest help, but it took five or six weeks to kick in. Ours were mostly AI bots, though, not Temu bots.

Was something done to the Report function? One time before I got a "that post has already been reported" response, which is fine, but now it doesn't seem to do anything at all. (Not that probably there's a need to report every single one of the eight Temu threads that are currently in the new posts...)

Either a more difficult CAPTCHA, or maybe moderator approval of all newly registered accounts...?

Thanks for reporting! Actually, that function works better now. I wasn't aware that it affected the user message, but I changed it yesterday to send email notifications to mods whenever a post is reported now. (Previously it was just an in-forum alert.)

And yes, reporting one post is enough, as we can wipe out all of a user's posts at once.

We'll obviously have to do something to curtail this; just a matter of what, and how soon we're able.

(As said elsewhere, if anyone is experienced in forum software wishes to help, we'd welcome it!)

Jen had the best compilation of what we did at Mystery Manor.  There is a free version of Cloudflare that has helped enormously in addition to all the other tweaks.  The DDOS was bad enough to take us down a couple of times.  Ghostlady said the folks at Cloudflare have great support if you are not familiar with it.