Russian spam bots

[yoritomo]

As some of you may know, we seem to have picked up a Russian spam bot on the forum. So far it has done a good job getting around our spam bot filters. To combat this bot, I am temporarily restricting new members from starting up threads on the forum. In order to start a new thread you must be a gaunt or higher. We will lift this restriction once we feel the bot has moved on.

The next step after this is account validation before you can post anything, and we are trying to avoid that.


If you see suspicious posts, please do not click on any links and report them to the moderating staff.




Thank you.

[yoritomo]

Just a quick update.

So far this week I've killed between two to four spam bots everyday this week. The steps we've taken have stopped the bots from spamming things over the forum, though some new members have contacted me about this.

The bot problem isn't limited to this site. I've gone to the proboards support people and it looks like this is a problem all over. Their recommendation is to turn on the registration verification feature. I know that some of our members are against this. I'm also against this method of preventing spam bots. I'd rather people be able to post as soon as possible rather than waiting a day for a moderator to get around to validating them.

[Overread]

I hate moderator authentication, but I think so long as a mod is around every 12-24 hour period its manageable. The issue comes if mods don't authenticate or turn up for weeks or months. A day waiting is fine if it really is just day, two or three days is pushing it nad any longer and you've lost the member.

Hopefully Proboards can get something in place to block the spammers.

[No One]

Yeah, as long as you remember to turn it off if you suddenly vanish . (A local site has authentication: I tried to make an account in 2016, twice, with 2 follow up e-mails, and still don't have one...though it isn't very alive, but it's not dead).

But seriously, you guys know how frequently you'd be around as to whether that side of things would work. I mean, it's not ideal, but:

though some new members have contacted me about this.

I think a lot of new members make an account pretty much entirely to make a thread: either for an army list, or a query on something. So to not be able to do whatever they signed up to do immediately is...unfortunate, and means that this would probably be preferable. (I know when I first signed up, it was probably a couple of months before a I hit gaunt).

[steffen84]

Hello,

good to now, i just registered to ask for feedback on my new Tyranid / GSC / AM list.
I would appreciate if you can approve my account

[No One]

To the best of my knowledge, it's still post-restricted i.e. you can't make new threads until you're a gaunt (10 posts). I was thinking about making a (temp) thread for the purposes of new members with this issue, but that seems...messy and probably not worth it. (yoritomo?)

[mattblowers]

Feb 14, 2018 9:52:56 GMT steffen84 said:

Hello,

good to now, i just registered to ask for feedback on my new Tyranid / GSC / AM list.
I would appreciate if you can approve my account

Just ask in an existing thread. No one is going to get all bent out of shape considering.

[No One]

mattblowers said:

Just ask in an existing thread. No one is going to get all bent out of shape considering.

I mean, if we're doing that I'd prefer if we just made one for that purpose, rather than hijack an existing one and make things really confusing if there's 2 or 3 separate discussions running parallel (I mean, that's an issue either way, but this way it's not lumped on some poor random ).

Edit: Wait, did I just make your comment true on multiple levels?

[yoritomo]

It's been about a week without any spambots trying to invade our forum. As such I've lifted the posting requirements to start new threads. If you do see spambots again please alert someone from the moderating staff.