Admin approved memberships!

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CurlyBlakey

CurlyBlakey

Wannabie Member
Recently, various bots have been trying to educate the members of this forum on the subject of tortoises, interknits, vindaloo, durableness and osmium, to name a few.

This is VERY ANNOYING!

I'm sure everyone will agree, that no matter how entertaining these posts are in moderation, they are just stupid when there's more bot posts than ones by actual members.

Please can the admins start approving memberships manually again? or think of any way to stop these?

CB
 
I agree with you, I was quite surprised to see so many new posts, infact quite happy as I thought we were getting more members. Turns out just spam, wonder what has caused such a surge in them all :/
 
Manually can be a pain in the ass if there are loads of people joining every day, but I'd support that if possible. Even though I think the bot problem is not too bad on this site, or the admins keep on top of it, in which case well done.

Also, I want to make a tortoise vindaloo now, thanks :P
 
The past few days have been quite bad.

Might be an idea for someone to do something.
 
It's the obscured letters and numbers you see when signing up to websites. Basically human verification, it is meant to be too difficult for a machine to decipher the text.

A few I've seen require something like "please type the 10th word from line five of the terms and conditions" or "enter a prime number between 2 and 11" something that requires a human to read and interpret.

Sent from my GT-I9000 using Tapatalk
 
Mikesmotorbike said:
matth1138 said:
I'll strengthen the captcha.
Click to expand...

captcha?
Click to expand...

Basicly means only humans can pass, abit like when you have to enter 8 random letters when you've posted to much on YouTube.

Persoanlly I think it would be better to have it when you create an account? Or to make a thread?
 
Of the dozen or so I banned and deleted, only three or four were flagged. Keep flagging, and I'll keep cleaning.

Reporting posts is accomplished by the little red exclamation point in the bottom right corner of posts.
 
matth1138 said:
Of the dozen or so I banned and deleted, only three or four were flagged. Keep flagging, and I'll keep cleaning.

Reporting posts is accomplished by the little red exclamation point in the bottom right corner of posts.
Click to expand...

Thanks for the info and I have just attempted to report the "Question about muggar or havening" post. Clicked the red exclamation mark and got the message "This post does not exist". Is this a normal response or are the BOTS getting smarter?

If we are vigilant and with the help of Admin and the Mods we can keep this irritation under control more quickly.

Don
 
I hate captcha, I don't mind using it to sign up to something, but for every new thread? I may never be able to make another new thread.

I might be subnormal, it's been suggested :D but honestly I can spend up to five minutes trying to get the flipping things right, 60 seconds alone spent hitting refresh trying to get something on the screen that I can vaguely read in the first place.

Something needs to be done though, these spammy spam bots are very annoying.
 
I am a moderator for essex bikers

One way I identified all the spam bots was to find a trend in their information when looking at the member list. For example

A HUGE number of bots had 'Man' written where it asked what bike you own.

I was able to get rid of tons of dormant bots in little time (found around 900

We also updated the registering feature which has done the forum favours.

We have had a problem recently with the blog entries being spammed though... Doh!!!!
 
An easy way to kill off spam bots is with a honey pot, very easy to do if you haven't already integrated one but wont stop a dedicated hack attack, they work a lot better than a captcha or a validation question like what colour is a red pen.

Just a couple of ideas for you ;)
 
Everyone calling for admin approved membership needs to understand something. There's only 1 admin, and he has a full time job and a full time family to deal with as well. You're calling for a huge workload to be added to someone who already has enough on his plate...
 
Trinith said:
Everyone calling for admin approved membership needs to understand something. There's only 1 admin, and he has a full time job and a full time family to deal with as well. You're calling for a huge workload to be added to someone who already has enough on his plate...
Click to expand...


Well said. Cant there be more mods on the forum then so they can delete the bots post and ban them?
 
Trinith said:
Everyone calling for admin approved membership needs to understand something. There's only 1 admin, and he has a full time job and a full time family to deal with as well. You're calling for a huge workload to be added to someone who already has enough on his plate...
Click to expand...

Just because there currently is only one admin doesn't mean there can only ever be one.

At the moment, the forums, especially yesterday, were nigh on unusable because of spam bots.

There are plenty of people who can, and will happily, help on here!
 
CurlyBlakey said:
Recently, various bots have been trying to educate the members of this forum on the subject of tortoises, interknits, vindaloo, durableness and osmium, to name a few.
Click to expand...

I know this doesn't really help the situation but if there was an award for "best first paragraph of a thread" this would win it.
 
Curly I think matt is taking extra precaution with allowing more admins because of the hacking scandal, but could be wrong. Having a few admins across the time zones would be helpful though, but like I said before, on the whole this forum does well with dealing with spammers.
 
It would make more sense to have a Catcha that you have to type what is seen before creating a topic/thread.
 
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