Moderators in different time zones


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bonienl, what about the implementation of some sort of capture for registrations?

 

Also I'm in the UK, haven't got the most free time but happy to help if needed.

 

It's a shame trurl needs to sleep really.. :)

 

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He can sleep when he's dead.  ????

 

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Don't know what's possible on this board but moderator approval of a new members first post would be better than what's been happening this week.

Not moderator approval, but instead email verification.  Mod approval is only going to annoy new users.

 

Beyond that, we're not letting you off the hook that easy just yet    :P

 

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Don't know what's possible on this board but moderator approval of a new members first post would be better than what's been happening this week.

Not moderator approval, but instead email verification.  Mod approval is only going to annoy new users.

 

Beyond that, we're not letting you off the hook that easy just yet    :P

I don't remember what happened when I first joined the forum. I assumed email verification was already in place and the spammers were getting in anyway.
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bonienl, what about the implementation of some sort of capture for registrations?

 

Also I'm in the UK, haven't got the most free time but happy to help if needed.

 

It's a shame trurl needs to sleep really.. :)

 

Sent from my LG-H815 using Tapatalk

Beyond all the joking around at trurl's expense off the top of my head the entire moderation system needs to be adjusted somewhat.  Admittedly I don't know everything that a mod does but from a user's perspective the only messages that I see about such and such post has been bilged or this topic has been split is something like 90% from trurl and 8% from Rob and the remainder from Joe.  (percentages completely off the top of my head)  (And I mean no disrespect to Rob / Joe)

 

The other mods that are still active within the forum outside of trurl, Rob, and Joe have possibly become disillusioned with the job and are no longer picking up their share of the work (from a user's perspective).  There are other moderators here that are no longer particularly active within this community, so their lack of contribution can be ignored / forgiven (life does happen) 

 

I hope that trurl doesn't wind up in the same situation.

 

Having CHBMB as a mod (he has a job that is meaningless and gives him lots of time) or other users that are still extremely active can only be a good thing.

 

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I was going to mention something similar, so I am on various forums UK based and non UK based. I did report one spam post as I normally do to flag it up but then I noticed the sheer volume of spam and thought best not to report them all as I didnt want to flood the mods with reports.

 

I genuinly dont remember if there was any verification link when signing up or even if site has captcha on registration page.

 

Maybe worth looking at some spam plugins or check if any security updates are available.

 

Just had quick look and site runs SMF 2.0.9 latest version is 2.0.11

 

Also read

Mods to Prevent Spam

 

One of the most important SMF features is its ability to be modified, and at the mod site there is an entire category dedicated to Spam Prevention mods.

 

Some examples of very clever anti-spam mods that have been created by our community are (in alphabetical order):

 

    Bad Behavior

    Forum Firewall

    httpBL

    Misc Anti Spam

    Stop Forum Spam

    Stop Spammer

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I've banned a bunch of spammers now, almost all from a Russian gang, using the same 6 to 10 well known spambot IP's.  All of the recent spam appears to be using the same spam software.  If we had banned the IP's from these, almost all of the spam would have been blocked.

 

I know there are compunctions from some about banning an IP, so I'd like to discuss the reasons I've become much more ruthless.  In my experience, it works!  Period.  While they probably could spoof the IP, they don't.  Period.  All of the most recent spam used the same IP's, that have already been on record for heavy spamming.  I would estimate that even without spam blocker software for the forum, we would have blocked several hundred of the spam posts by banning the IP's of the first spam that arrived.  Now if we consider the case of an IP not yet known on the spam blocker lists, it's either a new spammers IP (from a new zombie machine or a newly infected users' machine) or a spoofed one.  While it's remotely possible it's a valid IP being spoofed, from what I've seen, the spammers reuse their IP's over and over.  So no matter what we do, that user is going to have big trouble all over the Internet because numerous sites are going to ban them anyway.  While I do want to apologize to them, they are still going to need a different IP, to continue without any issues.  (And I usually don't ban the IP anyway, if I can find no evidence of abuse and it seems it could possibly be spoofed.  If it's going to be abused, I'll probably see it again.)

 

By the way, for moderators, there are several ways to see how many times a blocked name, email, or IP has been hit since the block.  Some have been hit thousands of times, meaning thousands of blocked spams.  These bans do work.  A human would quit after failing a few times, these are obviously spambots.

 

As to forum spam blocking software, we've had this discussion several times before.  I would again recommend adding one of the popular spam blocking extensions, as they have been proven to work over and over.  I would have to say that from what I saw of the recent spam, not one post would have gotten through.  All of the IP's were well known spambot IP's.  Different user names, different emails, but the same IP's.  Some day, they'll start randomly spoofing IP's, but they haven't yet.

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I don't know how well providers in that side of the world protect their internet access, but it is very common for providers to disallow address spoofing. Making it impossible for users to fake their origin.

 

It can happen of course that spambots are started from somewhere else.

 

The site of SMF refers to several spam protection mods, I would consider them as a step moving forward to automated protection.

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