Spamming....

[grzz51]

Is there anything that we as bona fide members can do about spamming. This stuff is getting out of hand :(

[arkfiremedic]

I am not an expert in the field of websites, but the pictures that were posted last week were some of the most distasteful I have ever seen. Is there any way new members may contact ArkGeocaching to verify an account BEFORE they are freely able to post? I have had to do this in other forums I post in and there seems to be considerably less SPAM and now we can add less X-Rated links and pornographic photos. Thanks in advance for any consideration to alleviate this serious problem.

[grzz51]

Hopefully something can be figured out. I didn't see the pics you're referring to so I won't comment. The continuous commercial spamming is what gets to me. Am I wrong or is it more on weekends than at other times? I've had to do the same as what you're saying on the several guitar and musical forums I'm a member.

[astrodav]

Many of them are usually Spam-Bots, not real people. They generate random user-names & often have several registered domain names, with which they can make up endless e-mail addies. This allows the Bot to do the common "Click-On-The-Link" verification process, so this method of spam prevention is often useless.

I helped start up a website which now has several hundred members. My part of the job was serving as chief moderator for the forum, until we could get it operating smoothly, with the bugs worked out. Within about 2 weeks of making the forum section public, we were getting up to 100 hits per day from these Spam-Bots.

The way we worked them out was to use a "Click-On-The-Right-Picture" verification process. We even overdid it a bit (which is always good) & made new registerees do TWO of the image-click steps. The forum would automatically generate a random question from a list of about 20 of them. It might be, "Click on the apple", & below that would be pictures of a grapefruit, banana, apple, & pear.

Over the next month of regsitrations, until the time I turned it over to full-time Mods, we never had a day where more than 1 Bot got through, & usually zero. Pretty good results going from 100 to 1.

The way we made this un-irritating to potential members was to only use questions/images related to the sites focus. For instance, here, the questions might be, "Click on the Ammo-Can" & "Click on the LogBook". No one ever griped. Contrary, they were tickled when logging in next day & not seeing a bunch of commercial ads & porn.

I sent this suggestion to staff a few days ago. Never received a reply. :? :?

[jclaudii]

Yea I was thinking something along the same lines could be implemented like: "Please type the abbreviation of First To Find." and the user types in FTF in the box. "What is the short hand for 'Thanks For The Cache" and let the user type in TFTC

Something a tad beyond a single radio button click because it requires actual input and knowledge of our sport. If anyone had any trouble...we would need a link to e-mail the board so someone could help out.

[Gaddiel]

I can vouch for the fact that dealing with spammers is a never-ending, ever-changing problem. The more popular your site, the bigger target you are for spammers.

Early spammers were actual people who spent time going from site to site, manually posting spam. Eventually, they realized that this was too time consuming with little payoff. The solution was to switch to spam "bots" (automated machines that do not require human intervention) that were much more efficient.

Modern software has evolved to help web site administrators deal with the problem. For this reason, some spammers have begun to employ spam "farms", which are real people hired to post to sites that would otherwise block them. I'm convinced that has been the case with most (if not all) of the recent spam in the forums here at ArkGeo.

There are methods that would be effective in preventing virtually all of these problems here at ArkGeo. Personally, I would like to see us manually verify each new account. The trade-off, of course, would be less convenience for the user and additional work to verify the authenticity of new accounts in a timely manner. How this is handled is up to the Association.

Wayne

[idratherbehiking]

Personally, I would like to see us manually verify each new account. The trade-off, of course, would be less convenience for the user and additional work to verify the authenticity of new accounts in a timely manner. How this is handled is up to the Association.

Wayne

I have been wondering why we did not do this from the beginning. This is something we need to look into. I will submit it to the board.

[grzz51]

Sounds like some good ideas coming out here...... I wished I knew more about how this stuff works besides hitting "enter". It seems we're on the right track though :D

[Ashallond]

The catchca that some websites use now has actually been compromised by spambots. So they now have catchca version 2, and that is even hit or miss on stopping the spam.

I agree that something should be modified if at all. php-nuke has a lot of freedom to make things custom. I haven't done anything with a phpnuke board in so long that I probably wouldn't recognize the back end controls, and I'd hope that some protection modules have been added since I worked with one.