Thanks for all of your continued efforts. I hope you are doing well. Maybe you can make come back East for a race weekend.
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| A Word About Spammers and User Registration http://forum.44cup.com/viewtopic.php?f=6&t=1011 |
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| Author: | Webmaster [ Mon Oct 17, 2011 6:36 pm ] |
| Post subject: | A Word About Spammers and User Registration |
I'm sure everyone has seen and/or been annoyed by the continued rash of spammers on the site. As the person who has to ban the IPs and remove the user/posts, I can assure no one is more annoyed than I. I've done what I can to eliminate the problem, but the problem persists. I wanted to offer a bit of background info on what's been/being done so everyone knows it's an on-going battle and we're doing our best. A few things worth noting: We employ a fairly aggressive captcha to discourage bots from registering. Despite this, the site has received an average of 2 spammer registrations per day over the last 2 years. Most of them do not make it past the requirement for them to verify their email address. The ones that do verify are the ones that create the stuff that annoys everyone. What can be done? We've had to resort to making the captcha fairly difficult. This has lead to real users having problems and for that we apologize. I tried to back off the difficulty today to allow a legitimate user to register and the result was 12 registrations in the last 12 hours. I know because I also set it to require administrator approval for all registrations (read: I got an email for each one). The end result is I'm going to have make it increasingly difficult for new users to register. For most of you reading this, hopefully this will mean less spam. For those who are reading this that are having trouble registering - please email us using the Contact Us page the Cup Website. http://www.44cup.com/contact We are very appreciative of our users and will continue to combat the problem to the best of our ability. |
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| Author: | SteveR [ Tue Oct 18, 2011 2:16 pm ] |
| Post subject: | Re: A Word About Spammers and User Registration |
Yea, I figured this was a real pain in your ass. If a spammer posts do you have to manually delete the post? When those posts occur to a forum I'm subscribed to, the email has the standard message, "...no more notifications will be sent until you visit the topic." How is that handled? Steve |
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| Author: | Director [ Tue Oct 18, 2011 3:07 pm ] |
| Post subject: | Re: A Word About Spammers and User Registration |
SteveR wrote: Yea, I figured this was a real pain in your ass. If a spammer posts do you have to manually delete the post? When those posts occur to a forum I'm subscribed to, the email has the standard message, "...no more notifications will be sent until you visit the topic." How is that handled? Steve Yes must be manually deleted. |
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| Author: | Webmaster [ Tue Oct 18, 2011 5:16 pm ] |
| Post subject: | Re: A Word About Spammers and User Registration |
SteveR wrote: Yea, I figured this was a real pain in your ass. If a spammer posts do you have to manually delete the post? When those posts occur to a forum I'm subscribed to, the email has the standard message, "...no more notifications will be sent until you visit the topic." How is that handled? I can remove all posts by a user, in batch, when I delete the user. Unfortunately, this is a separate process from banning the IPs and requires a validation of my administrator credentials regardless of cookies. I check the forum daily (at least) and remove what I see at the time. We've had four users get through the captcha in the last 24 hours. I think it's almost impossible to read, so either the bots are way smarter than I am or there are seriously dedicated people out there. I also had the flood interval set at 15 seconds, so the people who were posting 16 times had a script/person that was spending at least 4 minutes to get them all in. I've changed this interval to 60 seconds in an effort to slow them down without impacting our users too much. After some research, one last thing I'm going to try is to set a post queue. Anyone with less than 3 posts will have new posts queued for approval. If this works as designed, none of you should see any more spam. :fingers crossed: Of course that means more work for me... but hey, what's a webmaster good for anyway? |
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| Author: | SteveR [ Wed Oct 19, 2011 3:27 pm ] |
| Post subject: | Re: A Word About Spammers and User Registration |
I just wondered what happens if someone spams say, our Nationals 2011 topic, and I ignore the spam. Will I receive any other notifications for that topic or no, because I haven't visited that topic since the spam notice? |
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| Author: | Webmaster [ Wed Oct 19, 2011 4:30 pm ] |
| Post subject: | Re: A Word About Spammers and User Registration |
SteveR wrote: I just wondered what happens if someone spams say, our Nationals 2011 topic, and I ignore the spam. Will I receive any other notifications for that topic or no, because I haven't visited that topic since the spam notice? That I'm not sure about. I believe you won't get any more emails until you visit that particular topic... but that means you also won't be notified of legitimate post. I have been able to confirm the post queuing works. There was a topic created today that isn't visible to others but I could see. What I don't know is how it works if these users post on existing topics and the related notifications. |
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| Author: | Webmaster [ Thu May 03, 2012 12:18 am ] |
| Post subject: | Re: A Word About Spammers and User Registration |
Well, in upgrading our forum software to something that will hopefully combat spam (we were still getting ~10 new users a day, but they were invisible to non-moderators), I accidentally blew away all the custom styling we had. As a result, some buttons may have shifted around and some things may not look quite right. I'll work on getting things back to normal as time permits, so please bear with us... and enjoy the ad-free site for awhile! |
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| Author: | comatb [ Thu May 03, 2012 7:46 am ] |
| Post subject: | Re: A Word About Spammers and User Registration |
Thanks for all of your continued efforts. I hope you are doing well. Maybe you can make come back East for a race weekend.
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| Author: | Webmaster [ Thu May 03, 2012 11:40 am ] |
| Post subject: | Re: A Word About Spammers and User Registration |
comatb wrote: Thanks for all of your continued efforts. I hope you are doing well. Maybe you can make come back East for a race weekend. Sadly, it doesn't look like it's going to happen this year. My wife will be back east for the fall semester, so most of my time off and miles will be spent reuniting with her. I would have liked to align it with a race, bit the schedules don't really jive. Hopefully next year will work out better. |
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| Author: | Webmaster [ Sun May 06, 2012 8:04 pm ] |
| Post subject: | Re: A Word About Spammers and User Registration |
Everything should be (mostly) back to normal. Fee free to click a few ads to make up for the days we missed. 
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