Shopsmith Forums

We had another series of spam posters show up

Since one has to be a member to post anything it would stand to reason that we should tighten up the application process to help prevent auto responding automated spammers from being able to successfully register and reply, enabling them to post.

Admin, is there any way we can strengthen the membership registration process?

Everett

They certainly seem to be getting more numerous of late.

A more stringent way of approving new members would certainly be welcome.
I don't thing Admin spends a lot of time on this forum, I suspect they have a lot more pressing things on their plate.
They do, do a good job of removing the spam that is reported (flagged) to them. there is a lot of it that comes in every night and it is pretty much all gone by morning

Being on the West coast I often report some after most members have gone to bed and see many more that have already been reported by other members.

Yeah, I asked before here why they couldn't ask one or more questions of new members before approving them. I have joined other online forums where this is common practice and those forums don't seem to be overrun with spam like this forum is at times. Also the Shopsmith groups on Facebook require members answer some basic Shopsmith questions before joining as well. I would think that putting some kind of security check like this in place for new members would save quite a bit of time in not having to remove spam in the first place...

It is impossible to stop all the spammers using software. Software security simply doesn't work nearly 100%.
I'm a member on another forum that has a more stringent registration for posting. One of the moderators or administrators needs to approve all new members before they are allowed to post. That stops many of the spammers because if they can't get in without registering and waiting for approval, they simply take their crap somewhere else. However, some of them still manage to bypass the software security and post without being approved.
The best solution is to have multiple administrators and moderators who have the ability to nuke the spammers. That way, more eyes are looking and the spammers get sent packing much sooner than if one person has to handle all the work.

Hi All,

Thanks for bringing this issue to our attention. We are planning to start by improving the security of user registration using a better CAPTCHA security question. If that doesn't solve the problem we will go from there.

We have had a change of IT staff recently and are still getting a handle on forum administration.

We appreciate you all reporting spam by clicking the "report this post" button, and moderators reviewing and removing offending posts. Thank you for taking the time to do this.

-Shopsmith IT

mayl wrote:Hi All,

Thanks for bringing this issue to our attention. We are planning to start by improving the security of user registration using a better CAPTCHA security question. If that doesn't solve the problem we will go from there.

We have had a change of IT staff recently and are still getting a handle on forum administration.

We appreciate you all reporting spam by clicking the "report this post" button, and moderators reviewing and removing offending posts. Thank you for taking the time to do this.

-Shopsmith IT

It seems much of the spam includes cyrillic characters. Looking at the member info there are cyrillic characters there as well.

I believe filtering out those who use cyrillic characters would eliminate many spammers/posts.