New Registrations

[Tel]

I'm posting this in here as nothing much else has been put in here for a few months, and I like to give the search engine bots something different to look at from time to time!

Anyway, this is about the fact that I've stopped new registrations dead, which was a desperate move to halt the tidal wave of spammers who kept signing up and posting links to bad neighbourhood urls in their profiles.

That got this forum slapped and it lost its PR2 because of those selfish bastards, so to stop them adding more, which I have to keep removing I deactivated the new registrations link.

I'll put it back in a couple of days and see what happens. If the spammers start flooding back, I'll deactivate it again until I can figure something else out.

[shezz]

Isn't it sad that these people have got nothing better to do than spam people

Sad, sad, sad little men (or women )

[Tel]

Problem is, to them its a way of building links to their sites. Which is why they sign up to every forum there is in the hope that Google will spider the forum before the admin has a chance to remove their links.

That way they get indexed backlinks and the forum owner gets slapped for (unintentionally) linking to bad neighbourhoods.

Only way to stop them is to prevent them signing up, which is so annoying - I've checked on phpBB site and even with their new release there is nothing to prevent new sign-ups adding a url in their profile.

Which says to me that its all part of the system - forums are there for spammers to use. If the forum software builders like phpBB were serious about stopping spammers, they'd build that simple admin function into every forum version so that by a simple check of a box, spammers could be stopped in their tracks.

Instead they make it bloody difficult with almost impossible to understand patches - it took me ages to figure out the one I'm using that stops them posting urls in their first couple of posts to stop porn pictures appearing and I don't have the time to sit down and figure out more complicated stuff.

Bah, humbug!

[tam2005]

Wow Terry, I'm so sorry it has come to this.

I wish there was another alternative. Yes, indeed it is very sad that people have to go on spamming!

[Oosha]

[Tel]

Well, I've finally upgraded to the next level of phpbb and things are slowly getting back to normal before I go and mess it all up again and move to a new server.

One thing I have noticed is the number of registered users has suddenly plummeted from 1500 or so to just 235! I had a quick look through the list and realised that when I upgraded, all the inactive users were deleted! Its ok, they are not the ones who haven't posted, just the ones who signed up but never activated their accounts - namely the spammers!

At first I thought that was bad, because a high user number always looks good on a forum - just look at whydowork's list of members. But then I thought to myself, why? If the vast majority are not real people, what's the point?

Big membership numbers simply attract more spammers to register so it snowballs f you dont' do what I had to do and close off new registrations for a while. And if they're not even real people, then why bother with them? This is supposed to be an honest site and the forum should reflect that in only publishing real people who are active members. Of that 235, there are still some spammer accounts in there which I will go through at some point and delete. So then we'll all know how many real people are in here.

And it'll be that cosy, friendly family it was when I first started the forum.

[pizerule]

I like the new look Terry, very crisp and clean. And we all feel a lot better with the spammers removed from the place. Now I just need to clean them out of my damn email Inbox.

Damien