Require approval for new registrations?

[zen]

Hi,
Here's a poll. We're getting spam, even though the whole point of this kind of spamming is SEO, and there ain't any value in that on our forum. These guys are just idiots. (anyone else want to meet one of these people face to face, just once? I do. I'd like to show them how to get the most out of life, I feel kinda sorry for them)

[doublejack]

The spam makes the forum practically unusable and pisses me off every time I see it. When I'm logging in here with disc golf on my mind, I don't want to be pissed off.

If it's possible to distribute authority to approve or deny new registrations (or ban abusive users), I can commit to logging in a couple of times a day almost every day for fast approvals. (I'm online all day anyway.) If a handful of us did this, especially if we could also delete obvious spam posts, we could probably keep the forums pretty spam-free.

Just a suggestion.

[ross]

If that's the only way to beat the spammers then I say absolutely. It has gotten way beyond the point of ridiculousness.

[ben]

I volunteered last week to help clean up the board, and with the exception of the past 36 hrs(turkey+travel!) I've been checking the board 2+ times per day and deleting spammers/their posts. Hopefully it's been a mild improvement.

Even so, there will be 4-6 hour stretches where another handful of spammers sign up and vomit trash all over the place. I suggested the admin approval process, and zen rightfully figured that getting consensus was the way to go. He raised a very good point in the poll- if, for example, you're a visiting golfer and want to post to get info right before your trip, you'd instead have to wait to be approved.

I'd be able to check in and approve a couple times a day, but it still wouldn't be instantaneous. I still voted for admin approval, though. For me, having new users wait, at most, 12 hrs is worth never having anybody see a spam post again.

[Stick]

Any deletion of spam is a good thing.

[crosstoby]

The number of times someone will be inconvenienced by being unable to post for the first time at that immediate moment is far less than the number of times we're all annoyed and embarassed about the spam.

JT

[les swift]

If that's the only way to keep this crap off the forum, we should definitely do this. This problem has become more than just an annoyance.

[zen]

OK, these are the things I've done with the limited time I have, and 2 people have graciously already been deleting spam and banning users (the latter of which does no good). I have another person that offered to help that does the SVDGC site, which is great, but I haven't had time to follow-up with him yet.

SO this is what I've done lately.
-Every spammer uses the language setting of "AR", so if you try to register using "AR", you get sent to woops.com. However, somehow they still insert in the DB with that language, causing me to believe they are not going through the normal registration process. Because if I test that it is disallowing me before it ever inserts me into the database.
-I made all links "Nofollow" which absolutely does away with any value of them even spamming here in the first place. (i.e. a search engine doesn't see that as a new inbound link for the posted sites)

I have now made it require approval for new registrations.

It says this when you register: Your account has been created. However, this board requires account activation by the administrator group. An e-mail has been sent to them and you will be informed when your account has been activated.

The emails go to:
sfdiscgolf@sfdiscgolf.org
Which I presume is Scott or Jeffery (it's not me)

If they try to login before having registered:
The specified username is currently inactive. If you have problems activating your account, please contact a board administrator.

Really need to update and make sure we have all the latest/greatest spam stuff, too, and that is the point at which I requested someone donate some time to help us with that. I will try to get the interested party involved by the end of this week to do so.

Cheers.

[ben]

I got notification emails for the two test accounts you created, so somehow I'm in the loop there. I'll make sure to approve legit users as quickly as I can.

[zen]

Are you getting any registration emails from spam-like usernames yet? Let me know if that doesn't start happening, or if you continue having to delete spam posts. Thanks!

[ben]

Yep, got about 6 emails notifying me of new registrations between last night and this AM, all spammers. No new spam posts to delete, which is awesome.

Is there any way to add in an additional text field/question that must be filled out during registration? We could add a question that just says 'What's your favorite disc?', since that's a question that I doubt 99% of the spammers would be able to/be bothered to answer with a legitimate response.

Otherwise for now I'm going on the fact that legitimate users wouldn't enter a name like 'CighwigmaDricajew' , and if it seems borderline I'm looking up the IP to see if it's from one of the handful of countries with the most prolific spammers.

If we can't add a text field like that, what I can do for borderline cases is send a quick email to the new user and ask a couple simple questions to see if they're legit.

[les swift]

Thanks for the work on this!