T
The Fallen Angel
Guest
I think I may have just pressed the wrong button and emailed 1000+ members asking for registration confirmation.......please ignore.
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A good moment to point out that this is just a glimpse of what goes on behind the scenes -
while I've been away for a couple of lazy weeks
my colleagues on the Forum staff have been fighting off an invasion by robots -
no this isn't David Icke fantasy, it's all too real -
hundreds (literally) of new usernames being registered daily
just to import spam and worse nasties.
We have ways of fighting them off,
but it's tedious and time-consuming work sorting out the genuine new members from the bots.
This kind of thing happens all the time.
So don't be surprised if we moderators and administrators are sometimes a bit uncommunicative
or even occasionally a wee bit ratty -
and thanks to my colleagues for holding the fort!
Welcome back, Eul. And we do appreciate what you moderators/administrators do, especially considering the salary
t
t
Fantasmo
Senator
Nice to see you back.
It's a constant chase.
There are several potential reasons for this to happen:
- Weakness in the server setup or forum software, allowing new users to be injected directly into the database: The software needs to be updated from time to time. It's a pain because it's not without risk, but there is no way around. The forum software seems to be current, no problem there.
- Weakness in the registration routine (no or outdated captcha used). This surelly is the case here, that's an old / simple captcha that robots can handle!
- No verification via "registration enable e-mail". A mail should be sent to the registering user, containing an activation link. Only after this link has been used, the user is active. This doesn't exist here and should be implemented. It helps greatly!
It's quite obvious that the registration should be hardened. This doesn't eliminate all, because some spammers actually are humans (India / China), but sure prevents hundreds a day!