Thread

Due to all the dummy / spam member accounts that were created on my site (and here and elsewhere) I closed registrations so that the only way someone could register is if they emailed an administrator directly and they are manually registered. Well, as I mentioned HERE, we have been getting the occasional random registration (not input by an admin). Well, over the last 3 days we’ve had a large number of these types of registrations….probably around 30. And then today I noticed that you can’t post to my forum module any more. When users attempt to post to the forum they are redirected to our 404 page. My forum is here. Nothing was changed in my settings and nothing has been updated (EE, modules, plugins, extensions, etc) so I’m not sure what it could be. Could these random registrations that are breaking through my closed registration have done something to my site that isn’t allowing users to post? Any help is greatly appreciated.

Hi Mike,

Under CP Home ›  Admin ›  Members and Groups ›  Membership Preferences, what is Require Member Account Activation set to?  And what group are these new registrations showing up as?

Hi Brandon-
The “Require member account activation” was set to “self-activation by email”. The odd thing was that “allow new registrations?” was set to “yes” which is odd because I am 100% certain that I had the site set to not allow new registrations when I removed the public member registration page.

The new registrations are showing up as either “pending” or “members” so clearly they are getting the email and then registering. In the time period that I first submitted this post less than 3 hours ago I have had 13 of these new registrations….all of them use a yahoo.com domain and all of them have an email address that is a first and last name (such as .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address)) and a screen name and username that is exactly the same name on the email (ethelksison).

Any chance this can be related to my forum not working? It seems like an odd coincidence that I’d get this influx of unwelcome registrations and my forum stops accepting posts at exactly the same time.

Hi Mike,

Is this an MSM site? Do all the other forum functions work correctly except for not being able to post to a thread?

Cheers

Greg

Hi Greg-
It is an MSM site and all other forum functions appear to work correctly. Anything with mywebsite.com/forums/newreply/xxxx/ redirects though.

Any other thoughts on fixing the forum? It’s a focal point of this one site and it’s now been inactive for 4 days because users can’t post without receiving a 404.

Hi Mike,

With regards to the members issue, is it possible that member registrations at another MSM domain are showing up as members of your forum i.e is the member group shared?

For the 404 issue, it looks like you might have an .htaccess file active for your site. Is that correct? If so, please temporarily disable it and retest forum posts.

Cheers

Greg

Hi Greg-
Thanks for the response. I had thought about that possibility but we actually don’t even have member registration pages for our other sites. The member groups are shared but as far as I’m aware there’s no way for people to register through the other sites on the MSM.

I do have an active .htaccess file. I disabled both the one in the EE directory and the directory of the particular site with the forum and neither fixed the problem. With the one in the EE directory it had no notable change, and if I disable the one in the directory of the site with the forum it just makes the entire site return a 500 error.

Mike,

Are they the 3 MSM sites in your signature?
Can you provide us a member login for your forum.Use the MSG button underneath my avatar to send the details or to john.donovan at ellislab.com

What was in your htaccess?

Yep those are the 3 MSM sites. The one with the forum is elitetrack.

I’ve sent a member login for you.

My .htaccess file for the problematic site had this in it:

RewriteEngine On

RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ index.php\?/$1 [L]

RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^elitetrack\.com
RewriteRule (.*) <a href="http://www.elitetrack.com/$1">http://www.elitetrack.com/$1</a> [R=301,L]

Mike,

Lets eliminate you custom theme causing the issue first. I see you have the theme switcher commented out. Can you uncomment it for a few seconds then change your member theme to one of the defaults. Then you can comment it again. This way you wont affect any other user.
Let us know if that makes a difference.

Thanks but I’m not really sure where you’re referring to as I didn’t have anything to do with the forum theme..  Are you referring to the theme switcher for the forum? The theme for the site with the forum has been in inplace for 3 years with no problems. Would it achieve the same thing to just switch to one of the EE forum themes?

I switched the theme to the EE developer theme (where the theme switcher is available) and an attempt to post is still returning a 404 error.

Hi Mike,

To clarify, you’ve removed both the root .htaccess and the one in elitetrack at the same time, correct?

We need to get elitetrack going without any URL rewriting (adding index.php back into the site’s URL) to troubleshoot further. If you’re still getting a 500 server error when URL rewriting is disabled, can you ask your host to see what else might be amiss?

That’s right. I’ve removed both at the same time and I receive a 500 server error.

I’ll ask my host about what could be wrong.