I am Deleting Spammers Regularly. Latest is hilda4u

Andy,

What can we do to help you?  I hope that your elbow feels better.  Why would spammers want to corrupt our site?  There are some sick people out there  

Please let us know how things work out for you with the chiropractic appointments. 

Sharmin

Andy,

I am really sorry to hear that,and i am not very good at technical stuff,but on some sites when you fill out a form,suppose on Paypal,there is s star (*) infront of the fields that are necessary,and you can't hit the registration button unless these fields are filled,can't this be done with our bio field? i don't know how is it done and even if its applicable here,but it just came to my mind.

Zaini.

Hi Andy,

I got two advices for you.

A) You may choose to remove 'if you'd like' statement from the message that appears below. People sometime think that bio may not be necessary for registration (it creates confusion). Instead you can strongly word it as 'must provide' statement.

Biography:
Tell us a little about yourself, if you'd like.

B)

DELEGTAE

You may choose to delegate the responsibility of searching IP addresses to others who are interested. One way is to send them the IP addresses and train them how to search. This will ease your workload. You can better think what else you can delegate.

I don't know how long you can go like this. These physical injuries really hurts and may cause long term effects on your health.

The chiropractor worked over my forearm yesterday and it's quite sore, so I'm trying to minimize my typing for a couple days. The elbow itself doesn't seem to hurt as much now, but I won't know if it's improved for a few days. I was also given some exercises to do to help counter the problem.

We use a screening system, but bots figured those out some time ago. In fact, some even leave brief bios. I think the best thing I can do now is continue to ban IP addresses. Checking the ban log tells me it is having an effect because the same IP's try to register repeatedly, but are automatically denied once on the ban list. I don't know if it's possible to rearrange the layout of the registration page. I would like a bio mandatory. I really don't know much about the technical side of the website, so I'll have to make some inquiries.

So, if you don't see much from me the next few days, be patient, as I will be back.

Take your time Andy, hope you'll feel better soon.

Zaini.

get well soon Andy!!!

I'm typing again. Elbow still hurts but not as bad, so I'll see how I do this weekend. If I have missed something, let me know and I will get to it. Thanks for your patience.

I think making bio field mandatory won't help much either. As when people registering will see it as a mandatory field, checks can be bypassed by filling in garbage in the box. That's what people do when they don't know what to write in a required field. But, its worth a shot. I'll be more than happy to help with the technical part, let me know if you need me

Danielle is going to see if there are any changes we can make to the module to help stop spambots. A bio would at least tell me if there is some interest in thalassemia by the registrant. Meanwhile. I overdid it yesterday posting. When I was done, my arm felt like it was made out of lead, and today we have wet heavy snow yet again, which is torture to clean off my car right now. Bear with me and PLEASE be patient. Please don't tell me to get well and then ask for a quick reply to a post, especially when there is no urgency.

Our host installed a module today that screens all registrations against the Stop Forum Spam lists. This should greatly reduce the time and effort to screen out the spammers. It can't come soon enough. My elbow is on fire today.

Andy,

Make sure you are having the right treatment and above all the complete rest. I know how annoying and painful this could be. I really hope you can get better soon

manal

Two weeks later. "385 Spammers blocked up until today." The module is doing the checking for me, so I just have to reject the spammer registrations. This has cut down the repetitive motion quite a bit. The tendinitis in my elbow is taking its time clearing up, but there is slow progress. Adding in the spammers not caught by the module but caught by checking them at other sites manually means that we have had over 400 bogus registrations in two weeks. I wonder how much internet traffic is devoted solely to spam.

As I see it, you can do 2 things:

1. http://custom.simplemachines.org/mods/index.php?action=search;type=13
Theres quite a few mods that will make it harder for spammers and bots.

2. Remove the register-page and insert 1 big fat sentence: IF YOU WISH TO REGISTER, SEND AN EMAIL TO ANDY@THALPAL.COM

I know that it will send a very large part to your email, but you could make a new shared mail-account, and by shared I mean 2 or 3 persons can have acces to it and help you filter the right ones through?

It is nice to be able to get rid of a dozen spammer registrations with 3 clicks. If it continues to grow at this paste, I may have to investigate some of the other modules mentioned by Kocher. I am concerned that we're on track for 800 spammer registrations this month.

Andy,

Couple of other suggestions:

1. Increase the number of questions on the registrations page - currently, it has too few - add things like location, sex, age, etc to the registration page itself - this is currently left on the profile page for each member to fill up later. The more time a spammer has to spend on the website, the less he/she/it will be inclined to do so.

2. Consider switching to a different hosting service provider, who is less tolerant of spammers - and, if not already done, make sure that the website registration is marked PRIVATE with your registrar.

3. Add a second Captcha to the site - make this a numerical one - you have to do simple math to register!

Cheers

Poirot