Serious Stuff password

[JulietEcho]

Hey guys,

As part of our never-ending battle against weird spammers, we've added a password that's required to access the "Serious Stuff" forum. It's short, impossible to forget, and I'll be PMing all the regulars with it in a few minutes.

If you don't have a PM in your inbox with the new password information, post here or PM me (JulietEcho) or one of the other mods, prove you're not a spammer and we'll give you the password.

To prove you're not a spammer around here, you pretty much just have to type a full sentence without mentioning naked pictures of celebrities. So try to restrain yourselves, okay?

JulietEcho

[Chal]

Any particular reason that this forum was singled out?

[Arlen]

"Serious Stuff" seems to be getting the lion's share of the spam. We're not really sure why. It must have something to do with whatever automation software is being run by the spammers.

[Huxley]

Just get people to register and authorise their first posting. Simples.

[Chal]

Um, I think there was another edit/quote mixup there.

[JulietEcho]

Um, I think there was another edit/quote mixup there.

Yeah, I must have hit "edit" instead of "quote" so this all should have been from me:

Just get people to register and authorise their first posting. Simples.

I sank three+ hours into just that attempt, with the help of my software engineer boyfriend, and this system simply doesn't allow for that sort of thing. My other option would be to make it so that every new user who registers has to be approved by me before they can post at all, but the problem with that is that so many of the spammers *don't* fill out weird profile information or have easily spotted spammer-names. Many of them have names that just include a normal name/dictionary word and a number or two at the end, just like some of our users (wall and Jasen777, for example).

In the last two days, I've started banning "partials" of email addresses, so that people can't register with "xmail.net" addresses, for example, but many of them use gmail, which I obviously can't ban, as many of the "real" members use it.

Trust me, we're doing the best we can with the resources we have.

[Huxley]

Dont waste your time approving the new member. Approve their first posting. Dont let anyone in until they post. Spammers are not inclined to come back after the first post and they are less inclined to write something coherent and meaningful just to get in.

You will need to do something because spammers cotton onto the fact there is no method of preventing them coming on here. You will get overwhelmed. its worth the extra work.

Can you not for instance, make it so that all new members can only first post into "Introduce yourself"? .

[JulietEcho]

Dont waste your time approving the new member. Approve their first posting. Dont let anyone in until they post. Spammers are not inclined to come back after the first post and they are less inclined to write something coherent and meaningful just to get in.

You will need to do something because spammers cotton onto the fact there is no method of preventing them coming on here. You will get overwhelmed. its worth the extra work.

Can you not for instance, make it so that all new members can only first post into "Introduce yourself"? .

No, I can't. Trust me, Huxley, I've fiddled and fiddled with this stuff, and I can't do that. I spent three hours trying to find a way to do so, and I exhausted every tiny section of the admin options. I'm trying new things now, but that option just isn't possible on this current board set-up.

[Huxley]

Then i refer you to my alternative idea posted elsewhere. You do not have enough admins. and precious few moderators to patrol this board. You only have, as far as I can see, the Froggie to deal with this tripe when the rest of you lot are in your pits. So you need more with mod. status to do nothing more than patrol here on a 24 hour basis and delete this crap immediately. That way the workload is spread.

I once again, humbly, offer myself to patrol the board with very limited access Any number of us could nip this in the bud.

[JulietEcho]

No more password necessary for Serious Stuff, but it's good to know that particular feature works well, if we ever want to implement it for other reasons in the future.