Dark Bit Factory & Gravity
GENERAL => General chat => Topic started by: Shockwave on March 06, 2011
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Sadly, due to the nature of people and the internet a recent phenomenon of people creating profiles to advertise random businesses and websites is affecting us.
At the time of writing this, we have been getting fake registrations every day for the last year.
Typically these accounts do not post anything and just put one or more text links into thier signatures. Most of the automated registrations have been blocked but there are always plenty of people who are willing to spam links all over the internet for a few dollars so we can't catch the humans (yet!).
I've taken the descision that anybody who has an account with no posts is not contributing anything to this place and therefore their account will be deleted within 1 day of them joining.
If you have recently signed up, this means that you should post something, even if it's just a quick introductory "hi there, I'm whoever and I joined to learn about XYZ" kind of post. Failure to do this will result in the removal of your account, no exceptions, and a possible permanent ban.
These measures may seem harsh, but consider that over 600 fake accounts have been deleted this year, all with links in the signatures, harming this site's google rating because of irrelevant backlinks so unfortunately these measures are non-negotiable.
If you want to register and use the resources here, it's free.
If you can't be bothered to make an introductory post, we don't want you.
If you post an ad that is not relevant to the content of this site in your sig without permission you will be banned permanently.
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I am not against the idea ... I think I have posted enough to not be banned :D
But, maybe a bit better is to check the accounts with the following:
If ( nbPost == 0 and sig.hasSomeLinksInIt() )
Like this ... you can avoid fake ban. Anyway ... even removing people who ave no messages is not really important ... because they don't bring anything to the comunity (Ok I am rude). But ... it can be like ... they have registered once ... and forgot about the forum. (In one week ... we will be only 3 in the forums ;))
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Sounds good to me. But just to throw future ideas around so is the system winamps forums seems to be using now days quite nice.
You can't change your signature/avatar until you have posted 20 posts in their forum. I think 20 is quite high, 5 or so would be enough but the idea of it is good.
Of course that doesn't get rid of inactive spam accounts that are just created and never used.
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Thanks for your thoughts, unfortunately, smf does not allow us to check if the sig contains a link before deletion but as a compromise I created a new usergroup called:
"Zero Posters"
All the people with Zero Posts are in this category and they can all be emailed before deletion, if I was to delete them all now we would lose about 360 accounts who haven't posted (and probably never will).
As an extra fail-safe, members are instructed to make a post to introduce themselves when they join up or risk their account being deleted.
I'll need to look into the post limit on creating signatures, I'm not sure if our version of SMF lets us do it, but if it does then it will be a huge help!
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What about email subscription process:
- You register on forum
- You receive email to say ... click on this link to finish your process
Until the process is not finished, nothing is possible to do. The email can have a copy past link to trap the robot (I hope)
Account not validated -> Removed after 1 month
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Littlewhite, the forum already does this mate and it doesn't stop fake registrations. A lot of the fakes are human anyway.
Zero posters from now on will be deleted if they don't post within the first day of membership, it's not unreasonable to expect a new member to introduce themselves anyway.