• Welcome to The Building Code Forum

    Your premier resource for building code knowledge.

    This forum remains free to the public thanks to the generous support of our Sawhorse Members and Corporate Sponsors. Their contributions help keep this community thriving and accessible.

    Want enhanced access to expert discussions and exclusive features? Learn more about the benefits here.

    Ready to upgrade? Log in and upgrade now.

Problems with spammers registering

jar546

jar546

CBO
Joined
Oct 16, 2009
Messages
12,938
Location
Not where I really want to be
On Monday, I had to go through 243 new registrants. Sounds like we are really growing right? Wrong. About 5 of them were legit, the rest were spammers trying to register. Some that I thought were spammers ended up being legit and they emailed me when they got their rejection letter. I think some of them were turned off by being rejected and never returned, even though I explained the mistake and apologized.

With that being said, we installed a new anti-spam system which did nothing but cause us another problem as the board was unable to be posted on or edited by anyone until I got a complaint and turned the spam-o-matic off. Now we are back to me going through the registrants one at a time and we get them constantly. I don't want to lose any other legit registrants so I added some required fields.

Now there are additional required fields that must be filled out and I review to see if they are legit or not. The spam computers are getting through the Captcha but not getting through my one at a time review.

The bottom line is that we are going to see what happened with the spam program and trying to fix it. If you know of anyone who has had a hard time trying to register, please have them email me.

This is turning into a full time job! LOL
 
A suggestion, get the physical address and send the local building inspector to do a building inspection. If that does not work, send the FM.
 
I remember reading about a month ago on a tech website I frequent that Captchas have now gone to a point where to be complicated enough that a computer can't break it would make it almost impossible for a human to decipher.
 
On another forum I frequent, the registration required a question to be answered that only a real interested member could answer. Something like?

What is the abbreviation for the International Code Council?

If you don't enter "icc" then you don't get in.
 
Do you have or want any legit members outside of the US and Canada? If not ban the rest of the world. Sounds tough till you look for a legit poster from the rest of the world. I went through the roster on another forum, traced ip's and patiently waited for someone that would change my mind. That legit offshore poster never surfaced and the ban went in, spam dropped by 90+%.
 
I added 2 questions that are required to register. That helps. Spam-O-Matic helps the most but just let 2 through that I caught on the questions so the double layer of protection is working and I don't have no where near the amount of registrants as I did thanks to the spam program.
 
Apparently you are not the only one getting bombarded with spam. Electriciantalk.com has been attacked a lot the last few weeks. The owner Nathan is using stop forum spam--http://www.stopforumspam.com/search. He believes this will stop 80% of the bots.

Here is his comment

Over the past 2 weeks there has been a HUGE increase in spambots hitting forums. We have been testing methods to block them and I think we have a fix. Starting today we will install StopForumSpam which scans all new registrations based on IP address, email, and username. It blocks anyone who has been reported and should cut down on the spam by about 80% (Fingers Crossed).
Click to expand...
 
I am getting a large amount of spam on most of my email addresses. I will soon have to start looking for a solution.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top