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+--- Thread: Bogus Posts (/showthread.php?tid=459)
Bogus Posts - nigelgatherer - 08-05-2010 06:41 AM
We've had an unprecedented amount of new people signing up to this forum, so I'm expecting a sharp increase in the amount of bogus posts. I will deal with them as soon as they appear. Trouble is, they all seem to have gmail accounts; I'd like to exclude all gmail accounts, but I'm pretty sure there are some legit members who use such addresses, so I can't issue a blanket ban. Oh, the troubles of a forum administrator!
RE: Bogus Posts - ian - 08-05-2010 08:52 AM
I've just had a look, and see what you mean. Some very odd usernames.
In a BB I used to run, we got loads of spam registrations. I think they do it in order to be able to add a link to thier website so that they get more attention from search engine robots (though there are no URL's in the ones I looked at who registered today).
I can remember ... is there not some obfuscated text that needs deciphered when you register? You might also be able to add some sort of question that might weed these out, e.g. a musical question?
It might be worth checking out the myBB mods for anti-spam measures. I had a quick look and found two ...
http://mods.mybboard.net/view/stopforumspam-com-for-mybb
http://mods.mybboard.net/view/akismet-%28spam-protection%29
Ian
RE: Bogus Posts - Ray(T) - 10-05-2010 02:36 PM
If its of any interest, the Santa Cruz Guitar Player's Forum board does not accept Gmail (or Hotmail or Yahoo for that matter) registrations presumably for the same reasons. They seem to get along fine although I appreciate that some may be disagree. How about a member's poll?
Ray
RE: Bogus Posts - Eric Renshaw - 10-05-2010 03:07 PM
(10-05-2010 02:36 PM)Ray(T) Wrote: If its of any interest, the Santa Cruz Guitar Player's Forum board does not accept Gmail (or Hotmail or Yahoo for that matter) registrations presumably for the same reasons. They seem to get along fine although I appreciate that some may be disagree. How about a member's poll?
Ray
Hardly a statistical exercise I know, but out of around 24 people currently on the EMGO email list the count is:
yahoo 2
google 4
hotmail 1
which suggests that implementation of such a policy might well rule out a substantial proportion of the current forum users.
RE: Bogus Posts - Brian McClory - 10-05-2010 03:57 PM
Bogus posters will commonly use popular account providers like Gmail, Yahoo etc. because that is where most people have their email accounts. These are also the places where most hacking attacks are aimed and spam attacks originate.
I think the decision not to ban Gmail etc is the right one. Good luck Nigel.
RE: Bogus Posts - Ursula - 11-05-2010 08:39 AM
(08-05-2010 06:41 AM)nigelgatherer Wrote: We've had an unprecedented amount of new people signing up to this forum, so I'm expecting a sharp increase in the amount of bogus posts. I will deal with them as soon as they appear. Trouble is, they all seem to have gmail accounts; I'd like to exclude all gmail accounts, but I'm pretty sure there are some legit members who use such addresses, so I can't issue a blanket ban. Oh, the troubles of a forum administrator!There will always be people whos pleasure is to spoil other peoples pleasure. They really just want the attention so although it is time consuming for you Nigel the quiet no fuss approach is probably best and continue to exclude them individually as they appear. It may well be just one person with too much time on their hands.
Good luck
Ursula
RE: Bogus Posts - nigelgatherer - 13-05-2010 11:42 AM
Deleting them quietly isn't an option, because I can only delete one at a time, and I had 100 join in just a few days, so it's rather time-consuming. I've discovered that they're putting links in their signatures, so I've managed to set it up so that you can only set up a signature after youi've posted three times. That will at least give me morte time, and it may cut it down considerably.
RE: Bogus Posts - JAJ - 16-05-2010 10:48 AM
I've been having trouble with my AOL account lately with many people not receiving my EFC mail shots. So, I've created a Google mail account.
Unfortunately, many people's e-mail accounts are over zealous and can filter out e-mails before the receiver can see them. Sometimes, they don't even get shown in the spam box. For instance, my AOL account can't receive e-mails from The Session.org and I use a Hotmail account for this!
I think it's probably a problem for many to find a good e-mail provider that is inexpensive and efficient and which is freely available. For many, you have to be a member of an organisation.
RE: Bogus Posts - nigelgatherer - 24-07-2010 01:19 PM
I've been away for a week, and there are almost 200 people signed up, and almost all of them will be bogus. This has become a huge problem. It's difficult deleting them (I have to do it one by one), and it's difficult finding genuine ones (I know I deleted one person who turned out to be genuine). It will have to be fixed, but I don't know how to do it. I'll research when I'm back after the summer schools...
RE: Bogus Posts - alistair - 26-07-2010 04:35 PM
(08-05-2010 06:41 AM)nigelgatherer Wrote: We've had an unprecedented amount of new people signing up to this forum, so I'm expecting a sharp increase in the amount of bogus posts. I will deal with them as soon as they appear. Trouble is, they all seem to have gmail accounts; I'd like to exclude all gmail accounts, but I'm pretty sure there are some legit members who use such addresses, so I can't issue a blanket ban. Oh, the troubles of a forum administrator!
Nigel, You could always ask legit members who initially registered with a Gmail address (like me) to re-register with a different email address. For me that would not be a problem, but maybe would be difficult for others who have Gmail as their only address.
Alistair.
(24-07-2010 01:19 PM)nigelgatherer Wrote: I've been away for a week, and there are almost 200 people signed up, and almost all of them will be bogus. This has become a huge problem. It's difficult deleting them (I have to do it one by one), and it's difficult finding genuine ones (I know I deleted one person who turned out to be genuine). It will have to be fixed, but I don't know how to do it. I'll research when I'm back after the summer schools...
Just another thought, Nigel: couldn't you just close the forum to new members for a while? I guess there's a trade-off: you want the forum to be as widely read as possible, but you want to stop "spoilers" joining. Everyone would still be able to read the forum if you barred new members for a while, and you could legitimately argue that the right to post is a privilege that you need not, and maybe should not, grant automatically to all comers.
Alistair.
RE: Bogus Posts - Ray(T) - 26-07-2010 05:55 PM
Nigel
I'm a member of one board - not sure which one - which requires you to be approved before you can post. I'm not sure of the technical difficulty this would create. It would inevitably take up more of your time but perhaps not so much as getting rid of idiots who have already registered - it presumably depends on how many genuine people are seeking to register each week. You could possibly require people to email you with a brief statement of their musical interests and if they appear genuine you could allow access. All the best and thanks for all the good work.
Ray
RE: Bogus Posts - Jack Campin - 27-07-2010 10:03 PM
Unfortunately Nigel is using a standard forum system (mybboard) and as such there are limits on how different you can make its registration procedure from other forums.
But yes, the more unexpected the things you have to do to register, the harder it gets for spammers. The Masons basically got it right 300 years ago - rolled-up trouserlegs, hoods, menace by daggers and fire, and threats of painful forms of execution. You need real determination to get past the tyler to sell Russian brides or Viagra.
RE: Bogus Posts - Trish Santer - 11-08-2010 08:51 PM
I was recently contacted on Facebook by someone who had tried to get into the site but not been approved: he was after some music that I had posted, and I sent it to him. He has a very interesting website for accordion players. I'll email Nigel re this chap who might be an asset to the site, but I accept that it is very difficult to separate the sheep from the goats, especially with overseas postings and slightly unusual names, but I think this guy was genuine enough.
RE: Bogus Posts - nigelgatherer - 11-08-2010 09:04 PM
It's very difficult knowing who is genuine and who isn't. At the moment I have a couple of hundred people who have applied, the vast majority of whom are bogus. I can only approve/delete these one by one, and as I've been away for three weeks, you can understand why I'm behind. If I've deleted someone by mistake, I regret it. This is a real problem, and a king-sized pain in the neck.
Can you ask him what name he registered under, and if he's been deleted, to try again?
RE: Bogus Posts - ian - 23-08-2010 11:30 PM
The image recognition (which is setup for new registrations on the BB) thing is fine for stopping automated registrations, but not for real people. I think these people are just trying to get another place to put thier webpage URL's in order to improve thier search engine ranking.
One option might be to add a php modification to the BB code to ask one of more questions, and registration then wouldnt proceed unless they got these right. I did something similar for a php based BB I used to run. The trick would obviously be to make the questions hard enough to dissuade bogus people, but to not put-off genuine people. Usually there are hundereds of mods available for these BB's. Trick is finding the right one. Installing should be easy enough for anyone who has ever done any coding (and I think there are a few other geeks lurking here ;-)).
Ian
RE: Bogus Posts - nigelgatherer - 25-08-2010 08:56 PM
(23-08-2010 11:30 PM)ian Wrote: ...I think these people are just trying to get another place to put thier webpage URL's in order to improve thier search engine ranking....
Yes, that's exactly what it is, but "they" are not doing it, it's firms who have set up in business to increase your search engine optimisation (SEO), so they must employ people to seek out forums on high ranking sites like mine simply to try to include a URL somewhere. I hate these vermin, and I wonder if website owners realise that this is how they're increasing their SEO?
I have to spend time getting rid of these scum, but it's made worse if I have to go away - my three week summer school meant that instead of the usual 200 members, I came back to over five hundred, and sifting through that lot took literally hours. Because I have set the forum so that new registrations must be approved by me - otherwise we'd be infested by the bogies - it means that a genuine registree might have to wait, or worse, be mistakenly deleted.
Ach, it makes you wonder whether it's worth it.
RE: Bogus Posts - nigelgatherer - 16-10-2010 11:29 AM
Cleared out the bogus registrations on Wednesday. Looked this morning and there 66 new ones. I have to go through each one to make sure that there aren't any genuine ones and frankly I'm fed up with it. The alternative is to let everyone join and delete people as they make trouble. Maybe I'll do that. Will we then get a flood of spam, advertising, etc?
It's my opinion that it's to do with firms who say they can improve your site's ranking by linking to high volume sites. Mine's not extremely high volume, but it attracts a lot of people around the world, so maybe that's why it's a target.
Just venting.
RE: Bogus Posts - alistair - 17-10-2010 07:39 PM
(16-10-2010 11:29 AM)nigelgatherer Wrote: Cleared out the bogus registrations on Wednesday. Looked this morning and there 66 new ones. I have to go through each one to make sure that there aren't any genuine ones and frankly I'm fed up with it. The alternative is to let everyone join and delete people as they make trouble. Maybe I'll do that. Will we then get a flood of spam, advertising, etc?
It's my opinion that it's to do with firms who say they can improve your site's ranking by linking to high volume sites. Mine's not extremely high volume, but it attracts a lot of people around the world, so maybe that's why it's a target.
Just venting.
Maybe an alternative would be just to close the forum to new members for a while, Nigel. Anyone who knows you and is keen to join could just email you and (presumably) you could add them with a default password. And if anyone mailed you who had just found your email address somewhere, you might never even receive their message if your spam filter rejected it.
RE: Bogus Posts - Brian McClory - 17-10-2010 10:41 PM
You have my sympathies on this one Nigel.
What about using a plugin that stops stuff from known spammers? See http://www.stopforumspam.com/ where an explanation is given for the plugin and a place to register known pests. There is a specific plugin for MyBB: http://mods.mybb.com/view/stopforumspam-com-for-mybb
I have no knowledge of this other than what I read tonight but it sounds like you are not alone in finding this a problem.
RE: Bogus Posts - Eric Renshaw - 13-01-2011 08:05 AM
Looks like the whole problem has got a lot worse since 4th January when the bad guys worked out how to crack the reCAPTCHA system that safeguards vBulletin-powered forum registrations from automated bots.
See http://www.pcpro.co.uk/blogs/2011/01/12/
vbulletin-forums-hit-by-recaptcha-cracking-
spam-bot/?DCMP=NLC-Newsletters
[remove line breaks]
Eric
RE: Bogus Posts - nigelgatherer - 14-01-2011 04:31 AM
I have disabled registration to the forum, and I'm going to take up Alistair's suggestion, once I work out how to announce that in an obvious way on the front page of the forum.
Brian - I have Stop Forum Span enabled, but it doesn't seem to work very well.
RE: Bogus Posts - nigelgatherer - 14-01-2011 04:32 AM
I have disabled registration to the forum, and I'm going to take up Alistair's suggestion, once I work out how to announce that in an obvious way on the front page of the forum.
Brian - I have Stop Forum Span enabled, but it doesn't seem to work very well.