I was on this list a week or so ago when it had about 8000 members. Now it has over 8600. Just on July 7th alone it grew by 125 members. This incredible rate just didn't seem right. Has anybody been looking to see who's joining? They're all spammers. People who have zero posts and all of them have websites listed. Those websites are everything from porn, adult this or that, online gambling, dating services, etc. Those scumbags have no business being here. The vast majority of those 8600 members are spammers. Somebody should do a global delete of everybody with both zero posts and websites listed. That would get rid of all of them.
At the rate they're joining (and it seems many keep joining over and over again) we'll approach 30,000 members by the year's end. 80,000 by the end of next year.
Members List Overrun By Spammers
-
chris allert
- Posts: 52
- Joined: Mon Feb 27, 2006 8:01 am
- Location: olympia, washington state
- Contact:
user moderation needed
i run a small forum elsewhere ( http://www.toypiano.org/forums -- not much activity yet, but i haven't given up hope... ), and i have noticed the same thing. there are several new users every week, and i have to check it daily and delete all the fake ones. it seems that there is some kind of automated program out there that joins message boards running phpbb and fills them with inactive users.
the wierd thing is that the bogus users don't always do anything. sometimes they have a link to a non-existent web-site, sometimes they have no link. i used to give them a week to post something before deleting them. sometimes they will just post random meaningless things like "i completely agree" and "good point". now i just delete them immediately if they have a bogus web-site link, and delete them after a day if i can't tell but they haven't posted anything yet.
how do i know they are fake users? i guess i don't really. i have a message on the site telling them to send a pm to the forum administrator introducing themselves just in case they want to join but aren't ready to post anything yet so i won't delete their account, and i'm pretty sure a real person would do this, but then there's a reason we have the expression "rtfm".
i don't go to the trouble of setting up an account on a bulletin board until i actually want to post something, and i'm guessing this is true of most people. so i think just automatically deleting new accounts that don't post within 24 hours would be a good way to prevent all the spam users. but if you let them accumulate, going through each account one-by-one and deleting them will be a pain. and maybe that's what the spammers are counting on.
the wierd thing is that the bogus users don't always do anything. sometimes they have a link to a non-existent web-site, sometimes they have no link. i used to give them a week to post something before deleting them. sometimes they will just post random meaningless things like "i completely agree" and "good point". now i just delete them immediately if they have a bogus web-site link, and delete them after a day if i can't tell but they haven't posted anything yet.
how do i know they are fake users? i guess i don't really. i have a message on the site telling them to send a pm to the forum administrator introducing themselves just in case they want to join but aren't ready to post anything yet so i won't delete their account, and i'm pretty sure a real person would do this, but then there's a reason we have the expression "rtfm".
i don't go to the trouble of setting up an account on a bulletin board until i actually want to post something, and i'm guessing this is true of most people. so i think just automatically deleting new accounts that don't post within 24 hours would be a good way to prevent all the spam users. but if you let them accumulate, going through each account one-by-one and deleting them will be a pain. and maybe that's what the spammers are counting on.
-
Keith collins
- Posts: 128
- Joined: Sat Jun 18, 2005 2:13 am
- Location: seattle
- Contact:
-
chris allert
- Posts: 52
- Joined: Mon Feb 27, 2006 8:01 am
- Location: olympia, washington state
- Contact:
You can see that a few topics down some scumbag spammer started a topic called "Something". It's just a list of websites. All of their e-mail addresses should be spread all over the net so they get bombarded with spam.
What I think is that people should have to answer a few synth related questions correctly before getting confirmed to the list. Like what is the common dB per octave rolloff of a filter. Or an envelope typically has four stages, name the second one. A few questions like that would keep them all off the list in the first place.
What I think is that people should have to answer a few synth related questions correctly before getting confirmed to the list. Like what is the common dB per octave rolloff of a filter. Or an envelope typically has four stages, name the second one. A few questions like that would keep them all off the list in the first place.
-
chris allert
- Posts: 52
- Joined: Mon Feb 27, 2006 8:01 am
- Location: olympia, washington state
- Contact:
i think that the only thing you can do about message board spam is to have someone moderating the list who is trustworthy. one purpose of most forums like this one is for there to be a place where people can ask questions. having some kind of intellegence test would defeat this purpose. and if nobody can take the time to moderate this forum, it seems unlikely to me that anyone would take the time to implement a system that will test new users.P0LYM00G wrote:
What I think is that people should have to answer a few synth related questions correctly before getting confirmed to the list. Like what is the common dB per octave rolloff of a filter. Or an envelope typically has four stages, name the second one. A few questions like that would keep them all off the list in the first place.
with that being said, i'm not sure moderating this forum is the best use of moog music's time. i'm guessing that they are a relatively small operation that put all possible resources into developing products and delivering them to customers and distributors.
effective moderation of this forum would involve someone checking this site several times daily and deleting spam, which means someone working there would need to take time away from the job to do it.
of course it would be nice if they at least deleted spam once a week or so or else got a volunteer to do it more regularly.