NissanDiesel Forums

I've gotten two phantom users -- automated spam-user registrations -- that I know about so far. They can be spotted easily because they put commercial websites in their Sigs and Website profile links. I manually deleted them -- zero posts, of course.

The Visual Confirmation thing upon registration (where you have to type the letters and numbers you see in a randomly-generated image) isn't stopping them. This is apparently a fairly serious problem -- for other sites.

Right now, there is a simple solution: restrict the ability of someone to add a site to their profile until they've posted x number of times. I don't want to move to that solution until the problem gets worse, because few people ever go back to their Profile and add anything.

Another two today. I guess that I will have to restrict the Sig and Website entries in the registration process until a new user has made a post or ten or something. I get to choose the number of posts before allowing someone to tailor the Sig. Problem is, the Sig is important.

Maybe I can disable the URL bbCode in the Sig, and nuke the Website field.

I've finally had to do it: turn on Admin Review for new user registrations.

We are seeing upwards of ten registrations per day over the past four days, most of them bogus. The new user registration process has been automated for over a decade, but with this many "people" motivated to spam the site, I find that it's time to make each and every registration be verified by me first. I'm pretty sure I'm going to get tired of that fast.

Hi, Al!

I hope everything is going well for you. Have not chatted with you in a long time.

I deleted a bunch of those phony users just now. And again they are using gmail emails. The last time I banned Gmail emails, I locked out some valid users. If the flood increases, we may have to ban Gmail again as Gmail admin is apparently not screening effectively. I would point out that all bona fide would-be members have a valid email address supplied by their ISP. It may become necessary for us to have them use those valid email addresses so we can block spambots and spammers more effectively... Maybe ask all would be users to use their native email for registration via a welcome screen or on the registration page?

Enter suspected IP numbers here: http://www.stopforumspam.com/search
If they are polluted, ban that one as well as delete. Further incursions from the range may need a full range ban,

Andy

Regards

Well, I haven't seen any new forum spammers/spambots for a week or a little better. I've got the little bastards on the run for a while, I think. Many Russian and former soviet block IP ranges are now blocked...

Now, bring on the next crew!

NR