SudokuSolver Forum

Hi Richard,

Seems like this forum is starting to attract "fake" users. I've just googled for the names of the two users who registered on Sun May 18, 2008 8:00 am and Mon May 19, 2008 2:28 am, with the following results, only to find that both users signed up for multiple forums on the same day in a variety of different languages (turkish, romanian, spanish, portugese, german, vietnamese (!), ...), on extremely varied topics. Both showed several hits for the day, but no hint of any previous existence prior to that.

It was no doubt for this reason that Ruud chose to require account activation for sudocue.net. Of course, this decision worked against us in the end, although Ruud's unannounced decision to simply "abandon ship" can be regarded as exceptional circumstances...

If we don't also take action at some stage, we stand a good chance of ending up in the same situation as the DJApe forum, with (at the time of writing) 2939 members, of which only 154 (i.e., 5.24%, trend strongly downwards) have ever made a post.

An interesting short blog on this subject can be found here: http://www.communityspark.com/keep-your-phpbb-member-count-accurate/.

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Cheers,
Mike

Thanks for the pointer.

I'll probably take a look monthly at any users registered for more than a month with no posts and delete them if there is no contact from them

IMHO this is not a good idea. The only reliable way to keep track of read and unread posts is to have a user and log in. Many new members, at least for a period, probably want to read posts and get puzzles only, without necessary contributing until they feel they actually have something meaningful to contribute.

Anyone posting SPAM should of course be deleted immediately.

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Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?

Normal: [D  Y-m-d,  G:i]     PM->email: [D, d M Y H:i:s]

What I meant was I'd send them a "welcome" note and try to establish contact

There are some very good anti-spammer mods available for phpBB. You can read more at:

http://www.phpbb.com/community

I don't remember now which ones I've used, but they're not difficult to install. There are also some good mod-installation tutorials there (I personally prefer installing mods manually rather than using the various mod tools).

This is usually a case of "too little, too late". For every active spam account that is deleted, there are invariably several other dormant ones that have been created in the meantime. On the DJApe forum, spam accounts are now being created at the astounding rate of around 400 per month. Even if one or two accounts are actively used for spamming every day, and are quickly deleted by the site administrator (DJ), the spammers still be able to spam on the other > 300 remaining newly-created accounts (not to mention the older ones). Indeed, the total number of spam accounts there probably exceeds 2,500 now. So even if the door is sometime closed by DJ, there will still be enough existing accounts already created to keep him busy for several years!

The fact that we haven't seen any spam posted on the forum yet doesn't mean much. The spammers will probably want to create a big enough member base before they start actively spamming, and they have to build up this member base with some degree of subtlety, so as not to attract overdue attention and consequent drastic action. For this reason, it is advantageous to keep the user count as low as possible by cleaning up on a relatively frequent basis.

Incidentally, a fairly detailed guide to the various approaches that can be used to fight spammers can be found here: http://www.phpbb.com/community/viewtopic.php?t=427852.

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Cheers,
Mike

Mike,
Thanks for the enlightenment. I think I now fully grasp the problem and understand the need for immediate action. I assume that the spammers do not post the spam manually but use bots, so if they want they can "flood" a forum with spam in a very short time. Your explanation also explains while some forums require a CAPTCHA every time I log on to prevent the usage of bots.

The only thing that helps here is in one sweep too delete all accounts with zero posts.

_________________
Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?

Normal: [D  Y-m-d,  G:i]     PM->email: [D, d M Y H:i:s]

OK

closed the door a little bit.

I've modded the registration screen to put in a new mandatory field - this will stop automatic bot registrations
I've also upped the registration mechanism to user authentication

i'll take a closer look when I get back from vacation.

Rgds