Registration / Spam

[sd]

Registration and login are now required to post. This action was taken after 6 weeks of experimentation with spam blocking options. All options have some unintended negative consequences. At the end of the day an overwhelming majority (well beyond 2/3) of those voicing their opinion were in favor of requiring registration.

All banned IP addresses have been unbanned, so you can reach the board from anywhere.

Unfortunately, the spam problem is not over. It has gotten worse

After unblocking the banned IP addresses, we are now flooded with bogus registrations, so the spam goes on. If we don’t address the bogus registrations, our user list will become unmanageable. Currently the method of dealing with the registration spam is whacking, but it is much more labor intensive than IP banning since we get so much more spam and it will continue to grow.

Blocking email addresses is useless because of SMTP security loopholes. IP address are finite and real, but Email addresses are infinite.

We should be able to deal with the registration spam by periodically filtering the data base to delete all unconfirmed registrations, but I don’t currently have the application specific expertise to do so.

[Chris G]

Since the registration spam doesn't clutter our forums, only the offending users profile, it's fairly unobtrusive. However I've already installed a mod to the board that lets us easily and quickly delete users from within their profile, and I'm about to install a mod that lets us automatically delete users that are inactive. Inactive users are users that never responded to their registration email which accounts for the vast majority of the spam accounts.

[Chris G]

I'm also going to install a mod that hides inactive users from non-admin users so nobody has to look at.

[Chris G]

I've just spent the day updating the board from 2.0.19 to 2.0.21 so we're running clean-n-mean up to date sofware. I'm leaving the "easy delete" mod in place but am going to hold off on the other mods for a bit. The new software may help with the bogus account issue. If by monday we're still seeing a few bogus accounts I'll toss in the auto-remove feature and the ability to hide inactive users on the memberlist.

[Chris G]

Got a few more inactive users so I tossed in the Invisible Inactive Users mod. Now we don't have to look at them at all. When I can find a way to test the "delete all inactive users" mod without accidentally hosing our entire userlist I'll implement it. For now I'm content to delete them manually which, with the quick delete mod, takes about 3 seconds.

[Chris G]

I just added a "mass inactive account deletion" tool to help me curb the spammy accounts. It deleted about 6 accounts that were marked as inactive so if you just got an email from the Discussion Board saying you just got hosed, or thought you had an account but never got the SCPA Discussion Board Registration email, now would be a good time to make a new account and click the link in the registration email to activate your account. If you guys are making accounts but aren't getting your registration email, check your junk mailbox, or email me and I'll activate it manually.

[Ron M]

Good job Chris. We all appreciate the energy and effort you've invested in this.