A Banning We Will Go . . .

[Bill]

FYI - We are now banning from two to four registrants a day. These people just don't give up . . . :mad:

[tha3rdman]

mee next !

[c_amos]

It is an epidemic Bill, not just here but all over.

Thanks for the great work in maintaining the forum in its 'mostly spam free' state. :D

[mbd]

Bill, have you thought about going to the "approval before you post" method for new members? I wonder if that would make less work for you in the long run? I mean, how many legit registrants do you get a day? Probably not 2 to 4. So, if you do nothing - no new spammers. And I'm sure real registrants wouldn't mind a short wait until they get approved. Just a thought. It's a shame it has to come to this. Thanks.

[Bill]

The system does work that way, I'm pretty sure, since we cleaned out about a hundred ignored registrations a year or so ago. By banning, I'm hoping they finally get it and go somewhere else. Maybe it's a waste of effort.

[ebb]

Bill,
So you are BANNING
700 to 1500 registrants a year from this site! ??

Who or what is trying to get in?


I assume some want to sell you/us something like CraigSmith.
Some want to sucker our purient interests
Some want to sell us something - many want to decrease
our wallets or get money from us in some form or other...


But who are all the others? Hackers or hucksters, s...heads or shills?
Is it all disgusting stuff? Does some of it come from Croatia?
Are some just trying to communicate with a human out there?
Are any of the possible registrants merely misguided or innocent or plain stupid? Or nuts?
Criteria for acceptance to the site would be an abiding interest in Pearson Ariels, Commanders
and boat stuff in general perhaps. What else?

What is going on?:confused:
__________________________________________________ __________________________________________________ _
Approaching 7 billion people on earth. Half of them have a computer. Guess that explains it.
Thanks Bill, for keeping the spooks at bay.
This place has no equal.

[epiphany]

Ebb - Most of them are probably scammer/spammer/phishers, looking to join and, as members, harvest email addresses, or just post ads for discount drugs, etc...

We see the same thing at sailFar - some days none, then the next day, 5 or 6 bogus registration attempts. It got really bad a few months ago, and we had to go into active approval mode. What I've done there is to have a really good group of Moderators - 4-5 of which are very active (which means you can find 1-2 of us online at any given time) - and we have a back-channel forum where we can communicate about questionable registrations.

If someone signs up that looks funky, they get an email questioning their intent, and they must reply with salient detail before being allowed onboard as a member. So far, we have had 100% success at keeping bad guys away.

It is not an automatic solution, and does require active monitoring and sometimes even a small amount of effort, but it works well.

It's hard to tell sometimes who is legit and not - we have had several *good* members join who had really questionable looking email addresses/nicknames. Their replies to the email is what got them through the 'filter'. :)

Bill - in the Forum software we are using there, there is a way to permanently and automatically Ban people from even trying to join, if they use certain domains, IP addresses, or user names. If you have a similar setup with this software, I'd be glad to share with you who/what is on our Ban list - it might cut down on the bogus applications you have to deal with. That, or anything else I can do to help - just ask, I'd be glad. :)

[Bill]

Bill - in the Forum software we are using there, there is a way to permanently and automatically Ban people from even trying to join, if they use certain domains, IP addresses, or user names. If you have a similar setup with this software, I'd be glad to share with you who/what is on our Ban list - it might cut down on the bogus applications you have to deal with. That, or anything else I can do to help - just ask, I'd be glad. :)

Thanks. Let me check. The subject was suggested earlier that there might be some way to ban specific IP addresses, but then it was pointed out that the spammers might be smart about that and just keep changing their IP's. Guess they have nothing else to do . . .