Hi all,

Is it just me, or has everyone noticed the apparent increased level of spamming on this forum?

The spam bots seem to be able to get round the registration procedure for this site with remarkable ease... Can't anything be done in the new software to make the registration process less leaky?

While I'm on this particular rant, can't something be done about the number of users registered with 0 or 1 post? We've got pages and pages of registered users and if you're looking for someone in particular it takes forever.

Rant ends.

We just reduced the spammer by 90% several days ago, and now you post they are worse. <img src="http://www.catsailor.com/forums/images/graemlins/tongue.gif" alt="" /> I don't think so.

We changed the registration procedure so they must have a legitimate email address. To go to all that trouble to post a spam, someone must really want to work at it. Only to be barred once they do.

I think it is pretty well under control. If anyone should get bent out of shape about it, it would be me.
Thanks for caring,
Rick

Rick,

you are aware the the registration process and spamming is fully automatic? There are no person sitting there going trough registration manually, just a computer buzzing away with some pretty nifty spam-software.
The only way to stop spamming is having an input field and some graphical element showing something only a human can recognize. The input field must be filled with the correct information before the new user is accepted. This only works until the spammers software get advanced enough to decipher the information in the graphical element.. Then it's back to square one (until legislation and law-enforcement kicks in, which is the real solution to this).

I think John was referring to what you see if you look at the list of users registered with the website. There are a TON of automated spam usernames there. I believe the majority of those were imported over from the previous forum version - I don't think many of those came from this version.

I think we have fixed the problem with spammers posting on the forums (knock on wood).

But as far as the User List, does anybody actually use that? What purpose does it serve? I have only gone there a few times in the past several years to try to find a specific person to contact. And it is difficult even when I have a vague idea about the user name.

Maybe we should just eliminate the User List. What do you guys think? It is not doable for me to go through the entire User List and find and eliminate all the bad users, one by one.

My recommendation is to eliminate the User List (or make it invisible to all but the administrator?) unless forum users can convince me that it serves a purpose. <img src="http://www.catsailor.com/forums/images/graemlins/tongue.gif" alt="" />

Mary,

I guess that editing the user list would be a major PITA. However, I have tried looking for someone a few times where I can sort of vaguely remember the user name but can't remember it exactly. This has happened particularly where I was looking for some information from a post but couldn't remember the thread, but could (I thought) remember the username. When I realised that I didn't have the right username I resorted to browsing the relevant alphabetical section of the userlist, hoping that a name would jog my memory and then I could look at the user's posts.

I guess you could eliminate the userlist being available if it was still accessible via Search? - I've just tried using the search facility to search for usernames ja* (* as a wildcard) and it won't let me do it.

It'll work if I already know the username, but that's not a lot of use in the scenario I've outlined. In fact I've just tried entering * as a wildcard in a couple of searches and it won't work. I guess it just doesn't recognise wildcards? Can this be amended?

Big government save me.

The reasons spammers want to register on a forum is to include their website link in the registration, that link increases their rank in search engines. So even though most people never see the registration, the search engine crawlers do.

You also cannot block spammers from registering, even with the number-letter fields during registrations. Some spammers use porn sites to trick people into manually entering those codes and info to enter their site, when if fact they are really registering on your site!

no kidding? I can see how that might work...wow...that's sneaky

you could use the gimp toolkit to dynamically generate those number/letter codes everytime a new registration happens.

That way you couldn't troll for that info.