The future of the Lua Forums

[Stefan <stefan@...>]

Hello all, I was told by Luiz to ask here for assistance, so here goes:

I would like to keep the Lua forums at luahub.com running, but the 
popularity of the forums has resulted in recent unwanted attention. This 
attention come in the form of a huge number of requests from spam bots 
(human or software). At first I simply blocked the networks that the 
requests came from, but the last few months have seen a great 
diversification in the originating regions. This included a quite a few 
from South/Central America and Eastern Europe, and blocking those ISPs 
would result in denying many legitimate long-time users access to the 
forums.

The spam post themselves are manageable by the volunteers admins, who 
have done a stellar job. But the simple (denied) requests have reached a 
point where they are at times pegging the CPU of the server at 100%. The 
open-sourced software forum (written in PHP) used is likely not the most 
efficient for the use-case, and PHP itself is not exactly CPU friendly 
under heavy load.

So I put it to the Lua List; can we use Lua to solve this problem? I 
have a preferred Lua-based web platform that has proven itself in a 
heavy production setup:

Apache 2.4 (streamlined)
Postgresql 9.2

The Lua is provided by the new mod_lua that is included in the Apache 
2.4 core:

http://httpd.apache.org/docs/current/mod/mod_lua.html

So using this base, can a basic forum setup - written in Lua - be 
concocted that will handle the load and needs of the Lua Forum? I 
believe the answer is yes, but do not have the time to investigate and 
pursue such an endeavor. I am more than willing to continue to pay for 
the hosting and will donate a dedicated VM with lifetime (mine, that is) 
hosting service. What I ask of the community is the code that will run 
on this server.

Any thoughts?

--
Stefan