Hello,

Every day I see random gibberish names with upper and lower case that have no meaning at all. In other forums this has proven to be a way to spam.

If you view the members link and arrange by join date and descending, 60 per, you can see that the new random crapola names exceed real member signups.

You will also notice that most of these are validated and could be used to post.

If these names are counted in the membership role, then BFF has far fewer members than we let on to. You can't have a discussion about "why members don't participate" when many of the names are dummy accounts. Also, if you look at the sheer number of these additions on a daily bases, it is impacting as a membership statistic even if the names are never used to post spam.

Some things that occur to me as questions are:

1 ) do moderators have the ability to blow away these fake names?
2 ) who has the ability to do this?
3 ) does anyone care about the impact of this on the forums?
4 ) do we need some form of captcha or other security employed to prevent this altogether?

Honestly, I would rather know we had 3600 real members than 10K with 6400 fakes.

I'm sorry if this has been addressed before, I did search.




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Of course there will be memberships started every day for the sole purpose of spamming the forum. Because of this, there are features in place to prevent new members from starting new threads or using the PM function until an administrator manually promotes them to 'member', or they have reached a pre-set number of posts, but neither of those will happen if they're only here to spam the forum.

You mention the sheer number of these accounts that are created on a daily basis and you're right about that, but it would take several admins on hourly watch to keep them deleted as they come in. The current Admins could show up and delete them when they have time to visit, but that wouldn't be practical either - I'm sure they have other things to stay on top of here, not to mention a life outside of the forum.

When I was a moderator here, I'd sometimes try to go through and suspend the various fake accounts that had been created throughout the day or week, and it was a large task to undertake(and this was when Beckjord was still a problem). But again, with the current board settings there's really no need to worry about it. Just because there are X amount of fake memberships on the list shouldn't be a concern, and any discussion about the lack of participation by members in proportion to number of memberships should automatically have those particular statistics taken into account.



Moderators only have the ability to suspend the posting ability of the accounts - they do not have the ability to ban or "blow away" the fake names.



Those with the title of "Administrator", which always shows up in gold on the user list.



Speakings solely for myself and as a former moderator, I'd have to say that I don't worry about it at all.


You'd have to take that up with the staff, but in my humble opinion(as a regular member here) there's no need to fix something that really doesn't need fixing.

Coolio, that was the kind of answer I was looking for.

I'm glad I don't see ads every day to sell me a new cell phone or to enlarge my penis. So to that extent your right, it appearantly doesnt need to be fixed.

As long as we make the disinction between active members and fake members, I guess there isnt an issue.

I just wanted to address this as I have seen these names get harvested in the past, which is worse than the spiders crawling. Can you imagine if only a fraction of these were put to work spamming this forum?



Thx!

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I just love taking quotes out of context!

Hi

I am in on this one Here is my choice for out of context quotes night.

I guess there isn't an issue




Peace
Tim

LMAO!

Wow I could have said worse huh? You guys are funny.

The spammer accounts are regularly 'deleted' from the system, and are included in the 'total' number of members temporarily, until we recalculate the total number, which I usually do once a month.

A good indication of this is Night Stalker (above), who is technically member number 32,393 - we have just over 10,000 genuine registered members, which means that we have deleted somewhere in the region of 20,000 spam accounts so far!

I try to go in and delete the spammers that are stuck in the "validating" stage at least once a day. I missed doing it yesterday since it was raining and I was taking an extended nap. So, today when I did the deed, I deleted 91 validating spammers. New members not having the ability to start new threads is the one thing that saves the forum from being bombarded daily by these assholes that are so worried about your car's extended warranty and the size of your penis.