Just a heads up for the admins, you may want to check the authenticity of some of the most recent forum registrations. A few of them to me seem like bot accounts, I had an infestation on an older forum. You can usually tell by the email address they signed up with, and they put a link to some site trying to sell something as their homepage, as well as an ICQ number.

What they'll do is respond to some thread at random, quoting someone and saying "I agree totally" and have their website link in their signature. Sometimes it's a little obvious because they'll respond to some thread posted a long time ago. I also had one that PMed users telling them to visit a site offering free crap, and in turn got massive spyware infestation.

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"Competition is natural to the ignorant; and cooperation is natural to the wise." - Manly Hall

BEML has been getting a bunch of these as well. Mostly only posting in forums that dont' require registration though. I disabled guest posting @beml for everythign but help forum ... that really cut it down fast. still get a few of these registartion bots though. :/

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Is it better to remove them or just de-activate them? We already have it so you have to register to post. But what is the best way to stop them?

Well do you have the visual confirmation thing when you register? Where you have to enter the characters in an image that's displayed? That seems to keep them out.

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View Tribes Ascend stats for CynageN.
"Competition is natural to the ignorant; and cooperation is natural to the wise." - Manly Hall

Visual registration is active, and I prune the suspect users about once / month. Suspect means 3 or fewer posts, and obvious advertising links in their sig or www link...

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--> Born in 1972 and unable to PM or post without an editorial review, ! <--


No moose hunting without a license ! Licensing fees available by request .
Why hunt moose anyway? We're just big, slow, dumb, and make for easy kills...oops.

I just deleted 18 such users from BEML. email addresses are from cashette.com, rediffmail.com, mail.ru

some of the mail.ru ones were actually activated somehow.

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I'm actually questioning as to whether or not the entire process is automated. It seems like a human may actually be registering the account and activating it first.

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View Tribes Ascend stats for CynageN.
"Competition is natural to the ignorant; and cooperation is natural to the wise." - Manly Hall

Reminds me of an infestation of russian girls we got at an old team's forum. For some reason they initially suspected me...

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HAHAHAH Olga that is so funneh!

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For anyone who does the mods to the forum here, I decided to see if there was any counter measures that could be taken because I hate having to delete users one by one. I did manage to find a few,

[2.0.20] registration disable website signature
Author: EXreaction
MOD Description: When a user registers the website and signature sections are hidden. If they enter in anything in the hidden fields(only a bot would do that) they are denied from registration and if you turned the IP ban on, their IP Address is automatically banned.

Usually it is a pain to remove the spam accounts that are already on your board...but this mod makes it is easy.
[2.0.11] Admin Userlist
Author: wGEric
MOD Description: This MOD lets you view all of you members and various information about them in the Admin Control Panel. From the list, you can perform various actions on multiple users.


There are a few more here but these are the ones I've found most helpful thus far.

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View Tribes Ascend stats for CynageN.
"Competition is natural to the ignorant; and cooperation is natural to the wise." - Manly Hall

Mr. Mod Moose? Is this something you want to tackle?

The first mod takes about 3 minutes to do manually if you don't have easymod installed.

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View Tribes Ascend stats for CynageN.
"Competition is natural to the ignorant; and cooperation is natural to the wise." - Manly Hall

after your registered you get access to the signature and website boxes right because it would be a bad idea to install a mod that gets rid of signatures :S?

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View Tribes Ascend stats for BegginStrips.

Of course.. it just hides the fields on registration and catches any bots that register because they automaticly fill them out.

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View Tribes Ascend stats for CynageN.
"Competition is natural to the ignorant; and cooperation is natural to the wise." - Manly Hall

I will take a look. For the moment, I don't mind purging users 1-2x each month. I dropped 5-6 users about a week or so ago when this thread was started. Forum does have easyMod installed, so anything compatible with that makes the install easy.

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--> Born in 1972 and unable to PM or post without an editorial review, ! <--


No moose hunting without a license ! Licensing fees available by request .
Why hunt moose anyway? We're just big, slow, dumb, and make for easy kills...oops.