Russian invasion of Ukraine

Oh, and why is Russia blocked from LFGSS.

• Mostly bots, very large numbers of bots.
  
• Quite a bit of spam.
  
• A few scams (trying to sell very cheap Russian track frames for exhorbitant money and not always delivering).
  
• Some trolls with very poor English, which I do assume were part of troll farms.
  
  

But... the Russian ban is a very old one, just like the Vietnam one, and essentially goes back to when the forum platform was running on vBulletin, and at that time we were low-hanging fruit as tools existed that enabled spammers and bots to work against hundreds of forums at a time. The majority would've ended naturally once we moved to Microcosm as none of those tools worked any longer. However the Ukraine and Russian scams selling crappy track frames continued, and so even though it was then low traffic I kept the bans in place, but as Ukraine had actual real users (a few in Odessa, one I think from Kyiv) that was a CAPTCHA... Russia was never a source of real users (why would it be, it's a London forum?) and it was exceptionally rare for anyone to visit... so the benefit of removing the block was never there, so I left it.

Which is as good a reminder as ever that I should look at the firewall blocks and see if any of these rules still look like they're needed.