account activation due to spamming

ideology · Post by **ideology** » 26 June 06 9:13 am

now that we've locked off the international section, the spammers are registering accounts in order to post

a quick look at the memberlist http://forum.geocaching.com.au/memberlist.php shows the size of the problem
riblit also noticed that http://geocaching.com.au/links/cachers/ has more spam sites than geocaching sites, so has kindly modified it to only display the websites of people who've posted here

still, we are also getting spammers who post jokes just to get their post count up.

so we've taken the drastic step of now requiring an admin to activate new accounts.

we apologise for this - it's not very "open" but constanly cleaning up spam is no fun at all. we hope to put in some kind of CAPTCHA http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CAPTCHA test on it when we upgrade the software

Map Monkey · Post by **Map Monkey** » 26 June 06 10:10 am

I'm sure that poor Bulgarian cacher would want to know about GCA caches in their local area

What a problem

mm

The Garner Family · Post by **The Garner Family** » 26 June 06 6:00 pm

A serious problem & a sensible solution.

!mike · Post by **!mike** » 27 June 06 4:12 am

Looking at the "membership list", many of the WWW links are to sex sites.
Is it possible to wipe these "members" off? Might be a big job, but if future members are to be vetted you might not get any more of these www sites.

ideology · Post by **ideology** » 27 June 06 8:49 am

good point
we've sat down and deleted about 60 based on keywords in their email addresses and websites
a few more might have slipped through

Bundyrumandcoke · Post by **Bundyrumandcoke** » 21 August 06 3:29 pm

For those that may have slipped through, surely if any legit members can ID any of them, the info can be forwarded to mods for possible extermination.

riblit · Post by **riblit** » 21 August 06 10:00 pm

For the last month and a half all new accounts gave been manually checked and and any web sites shown visited to check the contents. The web site list code was modified before the manual checking started to only show a link if the user account is active and has made at least 1 forum post.
It means that new registrations might have to wait a few days but that's the price of spam.