Meet Aegis: spam defense across every board

If you run a board on ForumSpark, spam has probably never been high on your list of worries. That is by design. Every board sits behind Cloudflare, the platform is built to keep bad traffic out, and between our signup checks and a few quiet defenses working in the background, it is rare for a spammer to register and cause any real trouble. We like it that way. Today it gets even better.

The defense you already had#

Before the new part, it is worth saying what was already there. Every signup runs through a honeypot that quietly traps automated bots, a reputation check against StopForumSpam, a disposable email filter, and rate limits that stop anyone hammering the registration form. Trust levels keep brand new members from posting links or images until they have earned it. None of that is going away. It is the floor we build on.

Meet Aegis#

Here is the idea. ForumSpark hosts hundreds of communities, and every day their moderators make good calls about who is a spammer. Until now, each of those calls only helped one board. Someone banned on a cycling forum could turn around and register on a gaming forum a minute later. Aegis changes that.

When any board bans a spammer, flags one, or adds a ban filter, a signal is sent to the platform with the details that matter: the email, the IP, the domain, the username. Aegis gathers those signals, scores them by how many independent boards have reported the same bad actor, and confirms the ones it is sure about. A confirmed spammer goes onto a shared blocklist that protects every board at once.

• Blocked at signup across every board, by email, domain, IP, IP range or username.

• Blocked at the door for confirmed bad IP addresses, so they cannot even browse.

• Verified first using reports from several boards plus StopForumSpam, so one mistake never bans someone everywhere.

• Always reversible, and any board can add its own local exceptions.

It is the same idea Cloudflare uses at internet scale, brought inside ForumSpark and powered entirely by our own community of admins. The more the network moderates, the smarter everyone's protection becomes.

A ban system that does a lot more#

Aegis needed a stronger foundation, so the ban tools in your admin panel were rebuilt along the way.

• Ban filters block an email, an email domain, an IP, an IP range or an entire country from registering or browsing.

• Also block when you ban a member, so their email and known IP addresses are shut out in the same click.

• A full history of who was banned, by whom and when, instead of records quietly vanishing when a ban is lifted.

• A triggers log that shows every time a ban or filter actually stopped someone, with a last seen time on each.

• Network controls so your board decides whether it contributes to Aegis, whether it is protected by it, and which values to always allow.

A new challenge at the door#

One gap was left. A brand new bot from an address nobody had reported yet could still fill in the form correctly and slip past. So we added Cloudflare Turnstile, a modern, privacy friendly challenge that never makes anyone pick out traffic lights.

The best part is that almost nobody will ever see it. Turnstile only appears for visitors whose address Aegis has already flagged as suspicious. Real members register exactly as before, with nothing extra to solve.

What you need to do#

Nothing. All of this is live and on by default. Your board already contributes to the network and is already protected by it. If you ever want to change that, or add your own exceptions, it is all under Bans in your admin panel, on the new Network tab. Everything else simply runs, the way good security should.

A better editor to write in#

This release also ships some love to the editor. You can switch each feature on or off from the new Editor page in your admin panel.

• Search and replace, docked under the toolbar. Press Ctrl F, jump between matches, replace one or all of them.

• Image controls on every picture you place: click it to set the size and alignment.

• Spoilers that blur their content behind a reveal, for endings and puzzle answers.

• Code blocks with syntax highlighting and a language picker, plus tables that finally behave on mobile.

• Link cards: paste a link on its own line and it unfurls into a rich preview card, for topics on your own board as well as external pages.

• A GIF picker, smart typing and more: proper quotes and dashes as you type, emoticon codes that become the real thing, undo and redo buttons.

A small quality of life touch for admins to match: emoticons can now be uploaded straight into the emoticon manager, drag and drop, instead of linking it.

Performance updates#

Performance and security is something I take very seriously and something I'm never happy about. There’s been a few improvements where the heaviest pages on a board, the busy topic lists and members view, now do roughly half the database work they used to. Thus they render noticeably faster because of it.