Moderation of New User Registrations

Courtney Jacobs Posts: 903

2014-12-31 11:04 edited 2015-01-04 05:08 in General Discussion

Greetings Parallax Forum Users:

Due to the sudden and exponential increase in undesirable spam activity of late, Parallax has decided to moderate all new user applications.

This means that all new accounts will now be subject to an approval process, which could result in a slight delay between registration and account activation.

If you have urgent Technical Support questions during normal business hours, please call (888 99-STAMP (within the US) or 916-624-8333 (international)) or email (support@parallax.com).

Thank you for your patience; we apologize for any inconvenience.

Comments

Leon Posts: 7,620

2014-12-31 11:29 edited 2014-12-31 11:29

It would also be a good idea to moderate first posts by new members. I use both these measures on the groups I run, and spam is virtually non-existent.
Publison Posts: 12,366

2014-12-31 11:39 edited 2014-12-31 11:39

Yes, is a very good idea, and I think that is the intention.

I think we have seven or eight moderators spanning a couple of time zones to take care of this.
Phil Pilgrim (PhiPi) Posts: 23,514

2014-12-31 11:40 edited 2014-12-31 11:40

Courtney,

As much as I appreciate your response to the problem, that seems like a lot of unnecessary work on Parallax's part if it's done by hand. Spam bot posts are already auto-moderated, and it takes me less than a minute to get rid of however many show up on a page (only to moderators) and to ban their posters.

-Phil
SRLM Posts: 5,045

2015-01-02 07:03 edited 2015-01-02 07:03

Courtney Jacobs wrote: »

Due to the sudden and exponential increase in undesirable spam activity of late, ...

Is this due to losing the blacklist when the forum upgrade failed?
jazzed Posts: 11,803

2015-01-02 09:23 edited 2015-01-02 09:23

Good move.

Other forum sites also do this.
xanadu Posts: 3,347

2015-01-02 20:57 edited 2015-01-02 20:57

What about this?

https://www.keycaptcha.com/vbulletin-captcha/
Tor Posts: 2,010

2015-01-03 05:20 edited 2015-01-03 05:20

Captchas are unfortunately not very useful. First, bots have learned to do them, and secondly, a great many "bots" are actually humans in certain timezones working as human spambots. They check in in the morning (sometimes from a local internet cafe, sometimes from home or elsewhere), and start spamming. When the day is over they stop. And start again next morning.
So captchas basically create hassle for real users and has relatively little positive effect.

-Tor (moderator on other forums)
xanadu Posts: 3,347

2015-01-03 06:09 edited 2015-01-03 06:09

Are you talking about Recaptcha? That is a waste of space. Have you seen keycaptcha?

It is very easy for a human to use and very hard for a script to beat. It's not a win all solution, it just cuts down on automated scripts very well. Anyone manually spamming would hardly put a dent in the spam statistic over scripted spam. I've installed and administered some large Joomla sites, keycaptcha ended most if not all spam bots. I don't deny that some people have no life and manually spam but it's usually for their own site because the amount of work involved. That leaves them in a pretty small percentile and easily manageable by a few moderators.

If you haven't used keycaptcha or read the success stories I highly recommend you check them out.
Tor Posts: 2,010

2015-01-04 05:08 edited 2015-01-04 05:08

No, I have not used keycaptcha - I didn't realize that was different. But as to "human" spammers, it's unfortunate that I have to name countries but there are huge armies of human spammers in countries like [] and []. Spam originating from there are mostly done by humans, not by bots. It's their job. But it varies for each forum where different spammers are focusing their effort, so on any individual site you may not notice this. But it's just a question of when the forum is getting covered by these spammers. I have seen the wave coming on a couple of forums and wikis. Up to a certain point in time you may see mostly the good old spam bots. Then suddenly.. it can get so bad that the only way to handle it is to stop all new registrations. (And if you can monitor what happens in real-time you'll see that it's a human, not a bot working. But it's also a hint when you see spam only come during certain hours of the day).

-Tor
[Edit: I will edit out the country names in a day or so - don't want them in a sticky thread.]
[Edit: Done]

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