Signs of our times

[Mike Jackson]

In the past few weeks, I've had several different people send me an e-mail asking a question. I take the time to respond using their return e-mail address only to have another e-mail bounce back telling me I am not on their approved e-mail list. For me to follow up, I have to click a link and fill out a form.

So here we are, with all our sophisicated technology (to make life easier) running us in circles.

Right now, we have about seven pages of legitimate registered users on this site. Right now, there are 26 additional pages of registrants from "bots". They automatically fill out the forms and register, usually including links to other less than cultural sites. When we originally set up this BB, people could register and immediately post. The bots would then add all kinds of posts throughout the site, creating an administrative nightmare. Now we have to close the automatic registration and manually initialize anyone that looks like a sign person. Even then, Danny and I get 20-100 new bot registrations daily and it seems to be getting worse every day. It takes us about an hour to clear out a single page of bogus member names, so we have basically given up on that task.

Again, the low life segment of our society blows it for the rest.

Mike

[Kelly Thorson]

Hi Mike,
It's been somewhere around six weeks since we implemented changes to our Living Sky Letterheads forum. Like you we are using the same open source bulletin board. Before implementing the changes I was comparing the "bot" registrations between our forums and we were getting close to the same garbage.
There were three of us deleting the spam registrations and I know how irritating that can be, although I had a couple of very determined administrators in my court. A ten minute fix (changing two lines of code) completely eliminated the problem. There are a number of solutions to your problem, my offer to share our solution still stands, but if you are not comfortable with that, I encourage you to investigate other options. I have noticed that a number of forums using the same bb have a "dancing" character recognition softwear and they seem not to have any bogus registrations, although I suspect that will be cracked before too long. You can also use an "intelligent" question..ie: which pole is on the top of the globe, or something that can be found in your forum...ie: question + "The correct answer is revealed in the first post on the main page". Eventually, your change may be discovered and cracked, but you are a "quiet" forum, with not a great number of daily posts or traffic, so you probably aren't considered worth the effort. If it is, a different 10 minute fix will bring you another period of relief. Of your current 1664 members, only about 325 of them are legit. That means that well over 1300 "low life" are boosting their google ratings through your site or otherwise promoting themselves. Of course now you have gone from a site with less than 500 registered members to one with over 1500. I suspect you are a little more appealing, and your spam bots will increase. It's a fungus that feeds off itself.
The BB program we use is free, my server costs me $9.95 a month, at those kinds of prices I expect to have to take responsibility for solving problems that are not directly related to the services my host provides. You may well be in a different situation, but either way, one hour of proactive time could save you hundreds of hours of cleanup. in addition, you have the peace of mind of knowing you are not unwittingly providing a vehicle to spread pornography or other untasteful propoganda.
Hope this helps.