Dreamhack spam prevention

If you aren't careful, your Dreamhack (or other developer environment) will be overrun by spam comments and/or spam accounts. While this can be useful if you need a lot of comments on an entry, it's not really something we want to encourage!

Here are some things you can do to prevent spam on your 'hack:

Make sure anonymous comments are disabled once you're done

By default, anon comments are disabled in all accounts. If you change the settings on one of the accounts on your instance to enable anon comments for testing purposes, be sure to turn it back off once you're done.

This will prevent spammers from filling up entries with anon spam comments.

Make sure invite codes are enabled

Edit /etc/config.pl and make sure the following line is there:

$USE_ACCT_CODES = 1;

This will prevent spammers from making accounts to post spam.

You can change the 1 to 0 to Allow users to register when you need to make new accounts, or you can generate invite codes for the system or generate a promo code and use those instead.

Turn it off when it's not in use

The steps above will get most, but not all, of the usual spam targets. (The biggest spam target that isn't covered here: the support board. It will fill up with spam no matter what you do.) The easiest way to prevent spam is to turn off Apache when you're not actively developing. On Dreamhacks, this can be done by making sure to run stop-apache before you log out, or adding it to your .bash_logout file.