Stopping the SPAM

[(TKC)-o]T3[o]

In an effort to stop the spam I have made a few changes that I need to announce. They are as follows:

1) After the first attack yesterday I changed our registration spam countermeasures and it was a failure. I have gone back to the Q&A countermeasures and have updated the questions following the advice found here: http://www.phpbb.com/community/viewtopi ... &t=2122696. Unfortunately I was using a couple of those 2+1 questions and I believe that is where the failures were occurring.
2) I am now blocking all UTC-12 registrations. Once again the details of this countermeasure can be found in that link I posted in #1.
3) We are going to start utilizing the "Newly Registered Users Group". This is a group that all new forum members go into when they first register. I have set our forums so that you remain in this group for your first 10 posts. While in this group all of your posts will go into a moderator queue, meaning that your posts will have to be approved by a forum moderator.

Because of #3, we have promoted the following to the position of Moderator:
(TKC) brownman350
(TKC)Ihasabanana
(TKC)TheCrimsonStar
bobzwik
viperman
cobra_86
country_boy454
earth7man
Sinner0420

I have promoted a pretty big group of you so that none of you will get stuck having to approve too many posts. Since, I hope, spam bots won't be able to register any more, your job should be pretty simple and just require you to OK posts by new members. I have included people who have been around a long time and have thousands of posts, a couple of guys in Europe and a couple of newer members. Please make sure you do your job and if you come across spam, just delete it.

I'm not really sure what your "moderator queue" will look like, but I am about to register a dummy account so that I can see it and take a couple of screenshots.

Thanks.

[(TKC)-o]T3[o]

For the moderators, here is what you will see if a new members posts...

1) When you first login, if there is a post awaiting approval, you notice a symbol like the one to the far right.

ss01.PNG

2) After you open the forum that was indicating a thread that is awaiting approval, you will see something like the following. If you hold your cursor over the symbol it says something like, "Awaiting approval".

ss02.PNG

3) If you click the symbol, this screen will popup that will allow you to approve or disapprove the post. It shows what was said in the post.

ss03.PNG

4) If you choose to disapprove the post, you will be shown a form which allows you to select a reason for disapproval and you can type an additional message if you like. You can also choose to notify them via email.

ss04.PNG

5) If on the other hand you choose to approve the post, this is what you see. Again you can notify them via email if there post was approved.

ss05.PNG

6) If you choose to notify the member that their post was approved, they will get an email like this:

ss06.PNG

I believe this should be a fairly easy task for our moderators. If however it doesn't seem to be working out, we will discontinue this countermeasure.

Thanks T for taking these measures against it, and congratulations to our new mods.

[(TKC)-o]T3[o]

About once a year I end up having to do this to stay ahead of the spambots. Silly but necessary.

[(TKC)-o]T3[o]

Take a look at all the spam bots that TRIED to register but got stopped.. imagine if they'd all gotten in...

ss07.PNG

Wow thats a lot of bots, and thanks for the opportunity of moderator. Will do my best.

Also congrats to the others!!

Why in the world do people need to dedicate a bot to spamming, I swear somethings just... cannot be rationally explained.

Seems fair.
There always is someone who have to ruin for others.

Thanks T for putting me in the line up, Ill do my best to figure it out.

Nice measures taken. That's a LOT of bots. haha. Thanks for entrusting me with mod abilities, I'll do my best

You can count on us!

good job T, thanks again with the promotion of moderator

[(TKC)-o]T3[o]

BTW, if a bot was already registered before I put in the moderated queue, they will be able to post even if they have less than 10 posts. I just deleted a new post by a bot that registered on Oct 31st. I have deleted his account and will go thru the recently registered to see if I can tell which are bots and will go ahead and delete those accounts as well.

well no one has joined since the 31st. perhaps blocking the UTC-12 zone worked!

[(TKC)-o]T3[o]

well no one has joined since the 31st. perhaps blocking the UTC-12 zone worked!

I actually think its a combo of that, and making the Q&A questions a little harder.