Somebody get rid of nsk

[RuralWeb]

As all members of this forum are business users ie making money from the knowledge and help gained here then we should has a system where the ability to post costs a registration fee eg a one off payment of £10 used to support the operation of the forum. There is not one user on here that has not gained far in excess of that from the forum - many people would not even have a website/business if it were not for the forum so its time it was supported better.

I am a member of serveral forums that operate like this and in all of them I have gained more that it cost. If spamming continues then all that will happen is people will stop posting/subscribing and eventually a rival forum will be established

[Ginnys Attic]

One thing i've found with various other forums i use is something as simple as adding a further required field to the registration process asking nothing more than Are you a real human being which requires them to type "yes" seems to confuse and stop the vast majority the spam bots signing up and posting. The bots do still attempt to still sign-up but they fail registration as they usually enter something like America, United Kingdom or something similar and the odd few do still slip though by using USA (which is a 3 character answer as expected by the forum software).

You can also as Darren B says banning email address's or simply use of specific extensions such as:

*@*.fm
*@*.ua.fm
*@*.info
*@*.cn
*@*.ru
*@*.kr
*@*.uk.com

This will stop the use of specific domain extensions and checking your logs for the email address used and simply ban all of the extensions where possible would help slow up the spamming scum bags. You could go a little further and ban *@*.org and *@*.net which are also commonly used but this might affect a few customers so might be a little harsh but a few simple checks would show if it was reasonable.

[pinbrook]

Personally i can't see the problem with manual moderation - if someone need to use the forum they will wait - and search in the meanwhile

Maybe the autoresponse to register could say something like - most questions already have a response in the forum - please search whilst we process your registration or phone support esp if within 30 days free support

[Mike Hughes]

Some forums do seem to have a 30 day + 30 posts (or 7 day + 7 posts) rule that says you can't use URLs in the signature until you qualify.

I don't know if this can also be applied to links in the forum content, but something like this would seem to be close to what we want in terms of:

a) Not needing too much moderation input.
b) Still allowing newcomers to join in without having to wait.
c) Making it too awkward for spammers to be bothered with.

I guess ideally the system would refuse to accept any posts with links until the user had the required privileges. That way spammers cut & paste spam wouldn't even get in the system.

Mike

[Edit] OK. There is a Vbulletin hack for this: http://www.vbulletin.org/forum/showthread.php?t=129390

The filter limits the number of urls that can be included before a post requires approval from an admin. It can also be set so that it has no impact on members who have reached a certain number of posts. i.e only newcomer posts that include a url will require approval by an admin.

[jont]

Maybe a sandboxed board for non-license owners that does not allow hyperlinking? As a honest member of society I would not be too happy about not being able to post on a forum.

[Fairyglass]

I would have thought that a requirement of using this forum (i.e. being able to post, as opposed to view) would be that one has to supply Actinic with the serial number of your program. This way, only owners of the software can post, but those thinking about purchasing can still view and understand the benefit. While there might be a short delay verifying new users, it would still be possible to search for queries if necessary and provide a barrier spammers aren't going to be able to overcome.

[Darren B]

Any suggestions welcome, but to say that we somehow don't care is untrue. There's just very little we can do about it.

OK banning ip ranges, banning email accounts, ban throw away email accounts, as in hotmail, gmail e.t.c user have the option not to recieve email so no reason not to use there company email accounts.

just a couple suggestions

D

[CymraegKev]

I agree with up totally no new member should be allowed to post immediately. No other forum I'm a member of allows this to happen for exactly the reasons we see here.

Even a 7 day time delay between registering and being allowed to post would help. Nothing posted here should be urgent as up says so what's the problem

If I joined a forum and was told I couldn't post for X amount of days I wouldn't come back again simple as that.

Agree its not a support forum, and agree that encouraging users to search first is good, but deffinately don't think stopping new users asking questions is the way forward. Personally, none of the forums I am a member of have ever stopped me posting. Some of them use manual registration moderation but most use exactly the same methods that CD uses on this site, and all of them have the same issues with manual spammers.

Kev

[RuralWeb]

I agree with up totally no new member should be allowed to post immediately. No other forum I'm a member of allows this to happen for exactly the reasons we see here.

Even a 7 day time delay between registering and being allowed to post would help. Nothing posted here should be urgent as up says so what's the problem

[pinbrook]

It's very difficult to know how to tighten that up further beyond having a moderation queue for new users. This might be the only answer - but we currently don't have the staff on call 24/7 to make sure that genuine posters can ask their questions as soon as possible.

Surey this can only be perceived as something good - in reality it means than newbies might be forced to search the forum to find the answer before ploughing in to ask or even ask support.

As we have always said this is not a support forum so realistically nothing "urgent" should be posted anyway

there are plenty of forum that do manual moderation - its a pain if you want an answer but we live with it

[guccij]

It's very difficult to know how to tighten that up further beyond having a moderation queue for new users. This might be the only answer - but we currently don't have the staff on call 24/7 to make sure that genuine posters can ask their questions as soon as possible.

How about sending a link to new Actinic purchasers recommending they sign up for the community asap?

[jont]

Currently hot topic about paying sweat-shop style Chinese workers to manually apply for and create accounts to overcome captcha verifications.

[Mike Hughes]

We've just had another spammer join in - geekquoji spamming chinese dresses of all things.

Any suggestions welcome, but to say that we somehow don't care is untrue. There's just very little we can do about it.

I'm not trying to say that actinic don't care. I've always viewed actinic as people who do care and usually do something to fix stuff when they can. The issue I have is that it sometimes seems to take Actinic a long time to get around to doing things with the forum. The server problems being a recent example.

In terms of what can be done about it, I'm not sure.

The only reason for spamming the forum would seem to be for links (and or embedded dowload images). Is there nothing that can be done to create a system where the posting of embedded links is only permitted after one months membership (or one month after an inital post is approved). Until that time people would only be able to post an inactive link text for showing problem sites etc. Another idea would be that until manually approved, after 30 days or whatever, only links to actinic sites with /acatalog/ in the url are allowed.

There seems to be plenty of options along these lines that could be followed. Are any of them do-able?

Mike

[cdicken]

The 'Report Bad Post' button is now back as before. (little red triangle). You can use this for spam messages.

[cdicken]

As Kevin says - there is nothing we can do about manual spammers - and all the spammers we have had recently have all manually registered for the forum before sending the user logon details to some sort of terrible spamming bot.

The current registration process is:
1) User registers, where they have to complete one of those Captcha image checks.
2) They then cannot post, but are sent an email asking them to click a link to confirm their registration.
3) Once they click the link, they can post.

It's very difficult to know how to tighten that up further beyond having a moderation queue for new users. This might be the only answer - but we currently don't have the staff on call 24/7 to make sure that genuine posters can ask their questions as soon as possible.

Any suggestions welcome, but to say that we somehow don't care is untrue. There's just very little we can do about it.