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

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.

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.

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?

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

(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.

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.

(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.

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.

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

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Eric