Interrogations about publicity on this site that don't relate to boats......

[dompie99]

I am wondering how it could be possible to have a POST on this site about Samsung Galaxy Cell phones ??

Unless they come with a prop, i doubt they would relate to a boat site.

[CharlieN]

The posts are definitely spam that should be cleaned out.

[Scream And Fly]

I am wondering how it could be possible to have a POST on this site about Samsung Galaxy Cell phones ??

Unless they come with a prop, i doubt they would relate to a boat site.

Those are spam posts, which we remove every day. Because of this site's size and traffic, it is a huge target for spammers. We literally remove spammers every single day. I personally remove between 50 and 100 spammer registrations before they are able to activate their accounts and post, however some of then always slip through. It is a constant job that never ends.

Greg

[Laser LTV]

And you guys do a great job! I'm up early and it always gets slammed after midnight and you guys take out the trash early too!!!!

[CharlieN]

I have four forums that are much smaller than this one and it gets quite busy at times.

How did you like last March when that massive rush of false registries was coming in. PIA that was.

I have seen a few times in my short time here when you got hit pretty hard when the wrong spammer was let in. Recently one morning I saw them hitting hard, must have been 300+ posts, I know that day took you some time to clean up. I presume your software has one click to remove all user's posts.

[David - WI]

Supposedly they beat the reCaptcha phrases by presenting the image to some stooge who's trying to download illegal music or porn on one of their own sites. When the stooge types the reCaptcha phrase on the spammer's site; their bot enters that answer on your site. If you also have a question like "Prop is short for _____" then it's harder for them because they can't export the question as easily as they can the reCaptcha image. Making the question difficult doesn't help... because the stooge never sees the question anyway; but legitimate users do have to get it right in order to register. Supposedly.

[Galveston340]

...on my fishing site here for West Galveston Bay I see that they come and go. I have to every morning weed out the ones that I see are trying to get in from the "North Korean Hackers School"! Went to manual verification and it seems they have almost given up.

[CharlieN]

I have been blocking IP addresses and back in March I started wholesale blocking countries which kind of gave me problems since it was blocking some AUS and New Zealand members. It looks like some of the major switching centers are in China so even though I was not blocking the Australian's IPs the routing for them to see the forums server in Texas was blocked.
I ended up resorting to shutting off registrations for a few months just to make things manageable.

[CharlieN]

Looking at the spam that has been on the site all morning, would you guys like some help moderating this? Basically someone to help with cleanups?

[David - WI]

You should be able to set it up so that all "new" members go into a group that has their posts moderated. When their first "sensible" post is approved by a moderator and their post count goes to "1"... the board would automatically promote them to the "normal" group.

That would (should) keep the spam posts from making it onto the public part of the board, eliminating the "clean up". If their first post is spam you can ban them instead of approving the post.