Have all the spammers gone??

[rcutler]

This looks like good news! Since the forum update there seems to have been a huge drop in the number of new members and spam postings.

Question? Steve and Smokie have you been even busier and catching the spammers before they hit or was it the forum upgrade that has made things so much better.

[Paddy_NL]

It's probably winter in Russia now, all internet cables must have got frozen up

[Steve Pyro]

There's been some tidying up!

[smokie]

Without wishing to give awway the secret, Lennart did something during the upgrade which reduces the way the site "broadcasts" itself to spambots.

Before this, we were averaging a handful of new accounts per day. Steve in particular had done a fantastic job of banning users before they managed their first post, but sometimes they got there before we did.

For sure, it was starting to get very time consuming - and it is sometimes hard to tell just from an email address whether it was a potential spammer or not. My rule of thiumb was any email ending in .ru was probably dodgy (along with a load of others), as were user names like ILikeToSpam.  90% of the time you also find that people sign up when they have something to say, so a new account with zero posts always deserves a second look. I managed to block one existing member through over-enthusiasm with the wild card (e.g. *@*.ru is rather a wide ban!!), but Steve soon found my error and fixed it.

I'm pleased we haven't had to resort to the final authorisation method, which involves us actively allowing each account. This would also have been time consuming and a potential deterrent to new members.

[rcutler]

That is good, I thought you and Steve had just been up every waking hour or taking shifts to monitor the forum. Well done again then all.

[Martini...LB]

... there seems to have been a huge drop in the number of  spam postings.

You are still posting Rick ...