Infos about signing up at this forum!

[Stef]

In order to protect this forum from spammers you need to provide A VALID EMAIL ADDRESS when you sign up! You will then be sent an automatic email with your activation link in it without which you won't be able to activate your account and start posting.

If you sign up using an invalid email address, we receive a failure notice and will remove your account.

If you signed up, but never received a confirmation mail, it is most likely that you entered an invalid adress (accidentially or on purpose) and that this is exactly what has happened to you. If so, please be assured: It is not because we don't want you as a member in our forum! But since you can't activate your account and we can't contact you (because we don't have your email address) this is the best option, because a) it is no use in keeping an inactive account and b) you can use your preferred user name if you try to sign up again.

[Frank N. O.]

Hope the new initiative will work, although at Racerplanet we still get spammerbots despite a more elaborate system, at least so I've heard since I registered there way back in 2002.

What about us veteran users do we have to do anything?

Frank

P.S. Just listening to Wide Boy Awake "Chicken Outlaw" don't know why but I can't get it out of my head, especially when thinking of Chicken Wings and Chuck

[Stef]

Hi there Frank!

No, nothing changes for the "veterans" in here! Except maybe for those who have signed up in the early days and didn't enter their correct email address. Because when someone writes them a PM or they have subscribed to be notified about a topic, their notification emails bounces and comes back to us.

Anyway, I haven't changed any settings, I just put up this information here for "real people" users to encourage them to try it again, in case they never could activate their account. 

[Stef]

The last few days we've been infested with spam bot registrations providing email addresses ending in "@web.de". So we decided to block the whole domain name. Since we know that there are real people who use such email addresses, we thought we just mention it here. Write us a mail through our contact form or maybe use a different email address if you have trouble signing up!

[Frank N. O.]

Ah nice to hear some news on the changes. A friend of mine at RP who's also a staff member since way back said that most of their bots sign up with a specific 1983 birthday and one other common demoninator, possibly the ISP, not sure. I can ask if they got some more info you could get?

Btw, not sure if I said this before or not, but one reason for bots is that they post links either in posts or in their public user profile and then when search bots search the forum posts then that domain name gets a higher rating due to more places mentioning it, besides the usual spambots with pharmacy and such.

Frank

[Stef]

Hi Frank! Probably you're right, many links to your site increase your page rank... It kinda sucks that there's just little we can do, we can just erase these buggers. I just read somewhere that in Russia somebody killed someone who was allegedly the biggest spammer in the country. No wonder!! Of course I wouldn't want to kill anyone, but if I ever met a spammer in real life I might just interrupt my otherwise completely peacful way of life for a brief moment.

Anyway, if you can ask the guys at Racerplanet if they can give us any hints on how to minimize the problem, I'd be grateful. Maybe we could exchange ban lists or something....

[Frank N. O.]

Got an answer from Chris, a veteran RP poster like me and staffmember (who's also a really big Concorde enthusiast and official member of the development team of the SSTSIM Concorde FS add-on that's actually tested by no less than 5 real Concorde pilots/crew!). They use the forum called vBullitin but I'll quote the whole reply here, hope it helps, otherwise I can try asking some more.

Spammers are a huge problem.

If the forum you mention is having problems with spam, and they use vBulletin, then there are a number of good options on vBulletin.org (registration required).

We use a number of modules here to control it.

Trolltracker is our heavy-hitting system to control Troll users (e.g., Spiderman1, 2 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, etc..)

We also use an add-on called Spambuster to filter out suspected spam messages and report them. It won't delete Spam, but it will hide spam messages from non moderator/super-moderator/admin staff, while it will report to a specific forum so you can find suspected spam messages easily in one location.

Spambuster is only as good as its filter list, so you must actively keep updating it, and adding more things to it. Soon, it will become comprehensive and quite powerful.

We also now have a filter that prevents new users (less than 15 posts) from making links to websites. This has to be done since some spammers are making links to websites with highly inappropriate content.

Private message spam can be stopped by having a New Registered Users group, with limited rights, and no rights to send private messages. Users in this group can be auto-promoted to a higher user-group after a certain number of messages. (eg, 15 or 20).

Frank

[airtac]