Some changes to frustrate the spammers

[Clinton]

I made some changes today. From now all new members are blocked from creating profiles, signatures etc., and all their initial posts are pre-moderated.

Most of you should notice no changes/problems, but if you do please drop me a line by PM or to webmaster at this domain. Thanks.

[petertdavis]

You really getting hit that hard Clinton?

[Clinton]

I shouldn't complain really, it's only a few a day and I just delete the whole account if I sniff so much as a signature link to a ringtone site. So far everybody who has started off with a signature (and an ICQ number for some strange reason) turned out to be a spammer. What I'm fed up with is keeping an eye on every new account to see when it turns. Some don't fill in their profile till a few days after opening the account and, of course, I don't get notification if a lurker slips a viagra link into his signature a week or two down the road.

I should have done this right at the beginning - setting you guys up as a separate group from the usual "registered users". Now new posters need to meet certain requirements before they get "promoted" to your group and the "privileges" you have.

Can you tell I'm new at this forum running malarkey?

My next task is to get a stopforumspam.com API and autodelete anyone signing up from known spam IPs.

[ClaytonL]

Clinton, have you tried switching to reCaptcha on the registration pages?

[Clinton]

Always had that. But these monkeys seem to have banks of low paid employees who sit all day doing the human verifications for them.

It's been less than 24 hours and the new system is working great already! :-) I just manually deleted three accounts based on IPs, but I didn't need to, I could have accumulated them and deleted en masse at the end of the month as none of them can create profiles and none of them can make live posts!

[tke71709]

Always had that. But these monkeys seem to have banks of low paid employees who sit all day doing the human verifications for them.

I believe that I saw that one of the black hat tools out there charges $1.50 per thousand captchas broken by humans...

[Clinton]

One thing I noticed: When a spammer is registering an account the "who's online" here shows 2-3 "guests" registering simultaneously. They have different IPs and the IPs are usually proxies. At the moment there's 131.191.58.13, 189.19.50.26 and 69.136.16.130. In a few seconds, one new member will show up as being registered. So whatever they're doing requires a multiple IP/multiple people approach, but I don't care anymore - don't need to.

<added> Yes, he's registered and trying frantically to change his profile and signature. The who's online tells me he's hitting error messages and blocks (though you will probably only see him as "viewing index")

[Clinton]

In case anyone's interested - there were eight signups in the last 24 hours. Two have started posting and one replied to my welcome PM, seems genuine. The other five are likely the ones that will end up getting deleted at the end of the month. So, Peter, about five a day. Not too bad, is it? I'm guessing some of your forums get a lot more than that

[Ajeet]

I am glad to have the heavy moderation here. All posts and threads are worth reading. BUT, what happens when this forum grows in size and automated or policy-driven decisions take over?

[petertdavis]

I think eventually Clinton is going to have the decision between making this a private community or getting over run by crap.