The UK's Finest Independent Forum for Shooters and Gun Owners. Est 2010.

I got really angry when I logged on this morning.
4 spam posts had been submitted across the forum.

:evil: :x :!:

As much as I have been putting it off and hate to do it because I do not think it is in the spirit of the forum I have now decided to accept new members by approval only.

Thank you Rox for marking all 4 posts for attention.
Thank you dodgyrog for sending me a PM.

Some people just like causing trouble. There's a couple in our Club - they're a right pain in the arse.

christel wrote:As much as I have been putting it off and hate to do it because I do not think it is in the spirit of the forum I have now decided to accept new members by approval only.

Unfortunately dealing with this sort of thing is a fact of Internet life.

The signup process presumably deals with bots effectively via a captcha, but there are still teams of low paid workers who will manually sign up to forums in order to farm links (presumably in the hope that they are poorly moderated so that their links will remain long enough to be spidered by search engines). Moderated signup *may* not deter them. In that case, moderated signup might just be making more work, since they can still post the link spam (which requires cleaning-up) and you've also had to interact in the signup process (unless you can reliably spot spammers to reject signups, and the resulting reduction in spam more than offsets the extra work of moderating signups).

I guess only time will tell whether moderated signup will actually pay off by saving more work than it creates, and doesn't deter people from signing-up or lead to false positives.


The main thing is: don't let them p*** you off!

..

It is a fact of Internet life sadly. We tested the moderated signup this morning and it is very quick so hopefully people will not be kept waiting too long. Forum spammers are usually quite recognisable by email address if not by user name and the source IP can be very easily checked if in doubt, also they do tend to use the same mail account for multiple forums so they often show up on the forum spam lists. One important thing is to block the IP at the same time as the user other wise they are back in hours.

The bit that annoys me is the spammers could get in before and if they posted late in the day the post could be picked up by the Twitter feed.. :(

The price of fame maybe? It does make me wonder how they manage to find obscure little forums like ours though.

On our club forum, I have to approve everybody.

I get an email advising of the new registration, if the name looks like spam then I will deal with it when I am next there as they cant post until approved by me. If the name looks genuine then I will prioritise and log into approve the registration.

Hi

I did press the report button this morning but it was already reported some one was up early ,
I am a mod on another shooting forum and this is like a little job for me every day to check for spammers , they are easily recognised by the user name as most of the shooters seem to have a related username to the forum topics .
They seem to post mainly overnight so easy to pick out in the early morning .

Just an annoyance soon dealt with , hopefully .

Dave

Is this thread visible to spammers and trolls?

Yes as it is in News and Forum Announcements

Do we wish to share this info/discussion with spammers???

Well, yes and no.

Spammers can read but not post in this section.

Not a problem as such anymore because I will deal with every single user from now on.
Can't guarantee that one will never get through but even if that happened then it will be dealt with as soon as noticed.

As Rox also stated, I hope approval by admin does not prevent people from signing up.