PowerSwitch

....so I can clear up a lot of the spam around here....

Another volunteer here.

We need an active Admin, not more Mods.

JohnB wrote:We need an active Admin, not more Mods.

Yup... or give admin rights to one of the active mods.

I'd mod too if it comes to be a numbers game to keep ahead of these ones... but really that is not the solution we need.

This forum is a good place to be and it really needs to be kept clean and tidy one way or the other. Or it will cease to be that place.

Keela wrote: Yup... or give admin rights to one of the active mods.

I'd mod too if it comes to be a numbers game to keep ahead of these ones... but really that is not the solution we need.

This forum is a good place to be and it really needs to be kept clean and tidy one way or the other. Or it will cease to be that place.

+1

I'll own up as an not very active admin...

Ken's emailed me to delete the current spammers, which I'll do now.

I'll also have a chat with James and see what the way forward is on this, as we definitely need more administrators on the forum.

I delete a lot of spam, happy to be admim. I really just need to ability to delete accounts.

clv101 wrote: I really just need to ability to delete accounts.

And block IP addresses or what ever it is that you block to prevent them just reregistering under a new name.

What about introducing a 1st 2 posts moderated before being posted policy.... ?

I'm not a fan of blocking IP addresses as a first approach as most ISPs recycle IP addresses. Blocking the IP address of a spammer today, means next month a perfectly innocent person end up unintentionally blocked as their ISP has reallocated the spammers IP to them.

Hi All,

Just to let you know, after my chat with the other admins, Chris (clv101) has been made an admin for the purpose of deleting spammers.

Other admins may be added later, but we'll take it one step at a time. There may also be technical changes in future, including a new version of phpbb, but jmb will be the one to sort that our.

For information, the current list of moderators includes:
jmb, mikepepler, Tess, Andy Hunt, kenneal, clv101, Adam1, adam2, Bandidoz

...and after some more discussion, kenneal and bandidoz are now also site admins.

For anyone who volunteered (in private or in public) but isn't an admin yet, please don't take it personally - the people we've made admins are those who are known in person (not just online) to the current site admins.

Also, we don't want to end up with more admins than members!

I'm a forum site owner and due to the nature of my site attract a TON of spammers. It's phpbb3 too.

As you've already said, IP banning is a waste of time. It may be more "profitable" to ban at TLD level.

It's not instantaneous, but does see a gradual reduction for a while, followed by a rise, then a fall. (i guess over a month.)

To TLD ban, when you ban a spammer with greivUG23@viagra4U.com ... don't just ban that email addy. Enter a wildcard ban *@viagra4U.com ...

The asterix before the @ stops them then using greivUG24@ ... as you've now banned everything from @viagra4U.com.

you can take this further and double wildcard a ban. *@*.ru and then no one with a Russian email addy will be able to register.

As my site is a UK predominate site, I've disallowed (double wildcard banned) anything from Eastern Europe and China. If we get a surge of spam email addresses from a particular area, we TLD ban that too.

I may have wasted my time and you may already be doing all of the above. I may not have, and may have helped.

There are other things you can do too.. but I've already sounded like a Know It All.. so will STFU.

postie wrote:I'm a forum site owner and due to the nature of my site attract a TON of spammers. It's phpbb3 too.

As you've already said, IP banning is a waste of time. It may be more "profitable" to ban at TLD level.

It's not instantaneous, but does see a gradual reduction for a while, followed by a rise, then a fall. (i guess over a month.)

To TLD ban, when you ban a spammer with greivUG23@viagra4U.com ... don't just ban that email addy. Enter a wildcard ban *@viagra4U.com ...

The asterix before the @ stops them then using greivUG24@ ... as you've now banned everything from @viagra4U.com.

you can take this further and double wildcard a ban. *@*.ru and then no one with a Russian email addy will be able to register.

As my site is a UK predominate site, I've disallowed (double wildcard banned) anything from Eastern Europe and China. If we get a surge of spam email addresses from a particular area, we TLD ban that too.

I may have wasted my time and you may already be doing all of the above. I may not have, and may have helped.

There are other things you can do too.. but I've already sounded like a Know It All.. so will STFU.

I've done all that on Permaculture UK in the past, and then got complaints from genuine people who have been blocked too. That's why I now allow anyone to register, moderate the first two posts, and delete the posts and account of anyone who looks dodgy. It's worked so far, but it's not a heavily used forum.

JohnB wrote: I've done all that on Permaculture UK in the past, and then got complaints from genuine people who have been blocked too. That's why I now allow anyone to register, moderate the first two posts, and delete the posts and account of anyone who looks dodgy. It's worked so far, but it's not a heavily used forum.

With all due respect, it sounds like you may have wildcarded wrong then.

I was talking about tld banning, where you ban from an entire country. If "permaculture UK" is a UK site as the name suggests, them it's pretty much feasible to ban people from *@*.cn. As it is highly unlikely you'd get people with a Chinese email address registering for a UK site.

You can't, obviously wildcard ban *@*.com or .co.uk or many other valid email address end parts. But I think it is safe to assume that you aint even going to get that many Romanians or Russians. Or even Poles. So ban those notorious spam houses at a tld level.

Edit to say - My site get about 30 new genuine members per day, it has about 50 - 90 spam registrations per day. Only about 3 or 4 spammers get through the reg' process. of those, only about 1 -2 are able to post per day. an effective Mod team cleans up spam posted within minutes.. or at the earliest opportunity.