Is it my imagination ?

Post by **Scorch** » Mon Jul 19, 2010 11:46 pm

Eric made me an admin, so I get copied on all the new member registrations, which are 99% spam. I have posted a "How to join this forum" announcement in the main 2 stroke street forum. I hope Eric is ok with this. I have not heard back from him since earlier in the month.

Once I can get access to the forum files, we can see about upgrading and adding a better spam filter...and oh yeah, replacing this

with something like this

johnakay · Post by **johnakay** » Tue Jul 20, 2010 8:23 am

that'll be great getting rid of spammers and putting up a new logo.
good on ya

Post by **oldjapanesebikes** » Tue Jul 20, 2010 1:23 pm

johnakay wrote:that'll be great getting rid of spammers and putting up a new logo.
good on ya

+1 !!

Scorch
Just a (possibly needlessly picky) small question - I saw your note about activations and was wondering if it shouldn't have been in the 'General' section - and then also whether the General section should not be moved back to the top where it used to be ? No biggy, but to me it would be a better structure.

Joiseygirl · Post by **Joiseygirl** » Tue Jul 20, 2010 1:36 pm

LOVE the logo. Hope Eric approves.

muzza · Post by **muzza** » Wed Jul 21, 2010 12:13 am

Scorch is right...99% of the registrations are spam and non contributors. That leaves a few hundred genuine members.

As H2 says, ths is a board one can feel part of the family and come back to anytime without feeling pressured to contribute all of the time.

On the Ozebook backup board I get 5-10 spam registrations a day (which I delete). All registrations on the ozebook board are genuine. Maybe 1 or 2 a week are real people. The backup board has only been there about 2 years (since this board had a period of big downtime)....and has 236 genuine members (probably about the same as this board, but with some different people as well). It tootles along, idling slowly with no pressure on anyone.

Thus board is doing fine.

Post by **Scorch** » Thu Jul 22, 2010 11:25 pm

oldjapanesebikes wrote:
johnakay wrote:that'll be great getting rid of spammers and putting up a new logo.
good on ya
+1 !!

Scorch
Just a (possibly needlessly picky) small question - I saw your note about activations and was wondering if it shouldn't have been in the 'General' section - and then also whether the General section should not be moved back to the top where it used to be ? No biggy, but to me it would be a better structure.

I will copy it there, too. And I changed the text a bit, I overlooked the fact that a new guy cannot post in the thread to tell me his new forum name (duh!), so I changed that to "send me an email". Gmail does a pretty good job filter out spam, so I think a legit user can contact me, and then I can activate his account. Would love to see this forum grow!

I would rather not mess with the forum structure, that's an Eric decision. I am hoping to hear from him about getting ftp access and fixing this forum so it does not have 8000 unactivated spam accounts. He must be busy. I respect what he's built here.

TLRam1 · Post by **TLRam1** » Fri Jul 23, 2010 12:01 am

Scorch wrote:
oldjapanesebikes wrote: 8000 unactivated spam accounts. He must be busy. I respect what he's built here.

WOW, I just checked and had no idea we have 306 pages of members totaling around 9176!

Post by **oldjapanesebikes** » Fri Jul 23, 2010 8:26 am

TLRam1 wrote:WOW, I just checked and had no idea we have 306 pages of members totaling around 9176!

That's the problem - most of them are not members. As others have mentioned, I suspect the real number of real people is well under a thousand

Its annoying as hell that these crooks take advantage of a service like this - guys like Eric deserve a medal !

Post by **Scorch** » Fri Jul 23, 2010 11:09 am

Yeah, looks like the spambots began appearing around member #152
http://www.motorcycleracer.net/phpBB2/m ... &start=150

And by member 200 99% of of all new "members" are spambots.
http://www.motorcycleracer.net/phpBB2/m ... &start=200

You can tell because spambots win by getting their user account listed with a spam WWW link. The people who managed the spambots get credit for every successful link they place on the web and forums like this are goldmines.

muzza · Post by **muzza** » Fri Jul 23, 2010 12:35 pm

yup, as Scorch says, 99% are fake spam registrations. Don't kid yourself that there are close to 10,000 vintage suzi fanatics out there.

It is a big job to delete the spammers. Now that this board has this many spam regs it would take someone a year to clean out the database.

As I said the Ozebook backup suzi board would have 1000s of registrations as well..but I check every one individually as they come in and delete the spammers.

This site helps me check the names and email addresses....

http://www.stopforumspam.com

It is not a real big deal except when it gets out of hand and sometimes th spammers post some complete crap ads.

Post by **oldjapanesebikes** » Fri Jul 23, 2010 12:56 pm

muzza wrote:It is a big job to delete the spammers. Now that this board has this many spam regs it would take someone a year to clean out the database.

In this case, I doubt it would help anyway as this board appears to still be running the old series of phpBB - I think your board Muzza is on version 3 as is the Triple board. Spammers can directly access the user database here and bypass the approvals process, so any you delete are back again tomorrow. Really annoying.

Post by **Scorch** » Fri Jul 23, 2010 1:12 pm

No, it won't take long to delete the spammers

I can run a query in sql that will remove all users with 0 posts in about 10 secs. But oldjapanesebikes is right, unless we upgrade phpBB, they will be back faster than you can say "Harleys are slow".

Spam prevention in phpBB 3
http://www.phpbb.com/community/viewtopi ... &t=1861645

Of course, we could adopt vBulletin, that's the industrial strength forum package

Where is the "triples forum"? I don't think I am familiar with one...

Post by **oldjapanesebikes** » Fri Jul 23, 2010 3:07 pm

Scorch wrote: Spam prevention in phpBB 3
http://www.phpbb.com/community/viewtopi ... &t=1861645
Where is the "triples forum"? I don't think I am familiar with one...

Also see this on the SQL insertion issue with older phpBB versions and a possible fix.

The Triple board is here, and Muzza's board is here.

Probably should have started a new thread for this discussion

, but the issue with switching to something else is the risk of losing the member name association with the content they have contributed. There is a lot of incredibly useful information on this board - would not really like to put this at risk

Post by **Scorch** » Fri Jul 23, 2010 3:10 pm

No worries, an upgrade or conversion would retain all the user associations with the posts. I've upgraded my forums from phpBB 1.4 to phpBB 2 to vBulletin. It takes some work but it can be done. If anything goes FUBAR, the old forum structure and data is unmolested.

Ah, the Kawi Triples forum. Yeah, looks like they have 10,000 spambots too

Post by **oldjapanesebikes** » Fri Jul 23, 2010 3:47 pm

Scorch wrote: Ah, the Kawi Triples forum. Yeah, looks like they have 10,000 spambots too

Maybe - but I don't think so. For sure there are some.

Is it my imagination ?

yup

Re: yup