Any admin about to clear the spammers?

[travelling]

as title really

[Fred A-M]

I agree something probably needs to be done about it - not sure why PeteFrench was allowed to keep his registration to spam again, or maybe he simply re-registered.

Maybe there ought to be a restriction on the number of new threads that can be started by any individual say in a 24 hour period e.g Two, which should meet the needs of most genuine users?   That would both limit the amount of spam and should act as a subsequent disincentive to spammers as they generally seem to post multiple messages.

[stutho]

Sorry!  - I have being away from home for the last 10 days - back on the case now.

[travelling]

Thanks for sorting it stu

[Fred A-M]

This is becoming really problematic!  I appreciate that Stu can't be on hand every hour of the day, or even every day to deal with this.....

[stutho]

A huge amount of spam in the last 3 days.  I have added several more spam 'triggers' to try and stem the flow.  Sorry for any inconvenience.

Stuart

[JimK]

I was looking in the forums at www.adventurecycling.org and they seem to be getting unusual spam traffic too. Then there is the news... IMF got hacked and I forget the details but a lot of places that ought to have high security walls. Strange trend.

[stutho]

Due to the Massive amount of spam we are currently seeing I have blocked all  new members from joining automatically.

Our forum is partly protected  from spam by a site called www.stopforumspam.com Unfortunately this site has been hit by a  DDOS attack and is currently down.  (This will have affected MANY of the forums on the web.)  There is another similar site http://www.projecthoneypot.org/ but for technical reasons we cant use it :-(   

In the short term I will personalty reject or approve each joining member - but hopefully the stopforumspam site will come back up soon

Stuart   

[JimK]

In the short term I will personalty reject or approve each joining member - but hopefully the stopforumspam site will come back up soon

Thanks for keeping on top of it!

[stutho]

The bad news is that there were approx. 200 new member in the last 5 days - I suspect that nearly all of which are spammers!

[stutho]

If anyone is interest out of the 180 new members 170 were spammers - they have now been deleted.

[Fred A-M]

Wow that is severe, and the personal intervention is appreciated as the forum hasn't been a particularly family friendly place to go in recent days!   Are these registrations automated?  Otherwise, seems such a ridiculous length to go to for such apparent little gain and to cause such annoyance! 

[stutho]

The site www.stopforumspam.com has just come back up which means that hopefully I won't now have to personally vet any more applications - which is very good news - for me 

[stutho]

The final score:

with the help of www.stopforumspam.com I have removed 533! suspected spammers from the forum (all with zero posts)
I have also removed anyone with who hasn't been online in the last 3 months and has never made a post to the list

Stuart

 

[neil_p]

The final score:

with the help of www.stopforumspam.com I have removed 533! suspected spammers from the forum (all with zero posts)
I have also removed anyone with who hasn't been online in the last 3 months and has never made a post to the list

Stuart

 

Cheers. I don't know much about these things, but that sounds a heck of a lot!