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Took awhile to delete/ban all of this! :confused2:

when I left this morning there were like 12 different postings, I thought you would have fun:laughing:

You do know people can't see this post here, I think you need to move it to site discussions. :thumbsup::thumbsup::thumbsup:

Ric said:

when I left this morning there were like 12 different postings, I thought you would have fun:laughing:

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:laughing: I had a blast. :wink:

Ric said:

You do know people can't see this post here, I think you need to move it to site discussions. :thumbsup::thumbsup::thumbsup:

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OK....I didn't know if it was something moderators should just see or if it is fit for everyone. I moved it.

Good job guys... every now and then they get through the cracks.

Muhammad said:

Good job guys... every now and then they get through the cracks.

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They quit coming through the cracks about the same time the barn door was nailed open. You're obviously not on here in the wee hours of the morning when its nothing to see a dozen newly signed wanna-be Vietspammers lurking in the shadows and bidding their time to make their post(s). :thumbsup:

Maybe we should just ban all Vietnamese accounts? :ashamed:

Muhammad said:

Maybe we should just ban all Vietnamese accounts? :ashamed:

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I have an Idea, why don't we just stop banning members all together. Why don't we just remove all the spammers from our membership and in the process ban there IP addresses and Email accounts so they can't come back.

Actually we can just deleted all of the accounts with .vn e-mail addresses; they're all spammers.

Muhammad said:

Actually we can just deleted all of the accounts with .vn e-mail addresses; they're all spammers.

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Thursday morning 5.35 there are 18 members signed in 10 are spammers and 8 have already been banned and this is every day. The problem is we can ban members but we can't delete them from the forum so there still on the membership list and can sign in when ever they like. Deleted all of the accounts with .vn e-mail addresses; they're all spammers and that's fine but that's only a small percentage, what about all the others. You have at least one third of the membership here that are spammers, you have a number of members registered as many as two to six different times. The thing is one spammer breeds more spammers and it's only getting worse daily and it's to the point of the forum being flooded with spammers.

I reported about 4 yesterday morning. As I was told on other sites is to just report it instead of commenting on it.

Ric said:

Thursday morning 5.35 there are 18 members signed in 10 are spammers and 8 have already been banned and this is every day. The problem is we can ban members but we can't delete them from the forum so there still on the membership list and can sign in when ever they like. Deleted all of the accounts with .vn e-mail addresses; they're all spammers and that's fine but that's only a small percentage, what about all the others. You have at least one third of the membership here that are spammers, you have a number of members registered as many as two to six different times. The thing is one spammer breeds more spammers and it's only getting worse daily and it's to the point of the forum being flooded with spammers.

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Riddle me this, if the spam accounts are banned, how are they able to log/sign in? Why can't you delete them permanently? You need to make it to the point where they can't come back to datamine this place day after day. The scorched earth policy wins in the end and its going to take a year to get there.

You need to ban the following countries: Vietnam, Bangledesh, India, China & Pakistan. VN to save LMF from going over the edge and the other 4 countries for spite.

LMF in its current state is probably 6-12 months from teetering over the edge to becoming a full-blown spam site. There will come a point in time all you can do is pull the plug, honeypot the current forum and start over.

Right now just to keep up, you need someone that all they do is go through every single new account as they join. Check every IP and if its in the least bit questionable, ban it. Every email address. If the email belongs to a good IP but the email address has been reported as spam, ban because the email address is most likely stolen. Check usernames. Cross verify usernames with the email address. There are programs out there that collect email addresses per username. Background checks on everything. Ban/Report/Ban/Report. 24/7

buzzzmeister said:

Riddle me this, if the spam accounts are banned, how are they able to log/sign in? Why can't you delete them permanently? You need to make it to the point where they can't come back to datamine this place day after day. The scorched earth policy wins in the end and its going to take a year to get there.

You need to ban the following countries: Vietnam, Bangledesh, India, China & Pakistan. VN to save LMF from going over the edge and the other 4 countries for spite.

LMF in its current state is probably 6-12 months from teetering over the edge to becoming a full-blown spam site. There will come a point in time all you can do is pull the plug, honeypot the current forum and start over.

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That was the point I was trying to make, we ban them but we can't remove them because we don't have access to the admin panel to remove them so they can sign in because there still on the member list. I agree with all of what you say, that was the reason I said or posted what I did because I feel like something needs to be done soon or like you say 6-12 months it's going to be a full blown spam site.

Ric said:

That was the point I was trying to make, we ban them but we can't remove them because we don't have access to the admin panel to remove them so they can sign in because there still on the member list. I agree with all of what you say, that was the reason I said or posted what I did because I feel like something needs to be done soon or like you say 6-12 months it's going to be a full blown spam site.

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Yep, you can't not have a forum site with open registration and not give moderation access to the administrative panel. Mods need to have access to the membership information before any spaminating can happen. I've always said that Administrators that withold that info from the modsquad only have their forum to stroke their ego.

What forum software is this, vB 3.8.something? I could give you the work-around to get into the Administrative panel.

buzzzmeister said:

Yep, you can't not have a forum site with open registration and not give moderation access to the administrative panel. Mods need to have access to the membership information before any spaminating can happen. I've always said that Administrators that withold that info from the modsquad only have their forum to stroke their ego.

What forum software is this, vB 3.8.something? I could give you the work-around to get into the Administrative panel.

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It's Powered by vBulletin Version 4.2.0 and no I'm not going the work around way.

I just came back to the computer a few minutes ago and counted 14 spammers in the currently active member listing. This IMO should not be happening. :frown:

Ric said:

I just came back to the computer a few minutes ago and counted 14 spammers in the currently active member listing. This IMO should not be happening. :frown:

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:confused3: Yeah I saw that, too.....but you had already banned them! :thumbsup:

lawn mower fanatic said:

:confused3: Yeah I saw that, too.....but you had already banned them! :thumbsup:

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I guess that's my point they have been banned and there still there and it's just breeding more.

Ric said:

I guess that's my point they have been banned and there still there and it's just breeding more.

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And you can tell they are related because they all start with the same letter...today it's 'h' (and similar names)! :confused2:

huongdienabc2, huongdienabc3, huongdienabc4, huongnb11, huongnb12,

lawn mower fanatic said:

And you can tell they are related because they all start with the same letter...today it's 'h' (and similar names)! :confused2:

huongdienabc2, huongdienabc3, huongdienabc4, huongnb11, huongnb12,

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I think It really is like buzzzmeister said LMF in its current state is probably 6-12 months from teetering over the edge to becoming a full-blown spam site.

Ric said:

I think It really is like buzzzmeister said LMF in its current state is probably 6-12 months from teetering over the edge to becoming a full-blown spam site.

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The future: :confused2:


(http://community.secondlife.com/t5/...4A400ACC9659/image-size/medium?v=mpbl-1&px=-1)

Every thing in bold are spammers presently signed in to the forum

• Ric,
• 1mstrb,
• Atroniern
• A_tank96+,
• bakerg,
• BHLC,
• BWH,
• Carscw,
• chendShoome,
• conga1148,
• CZLawnCare,
• davbell22602,
• ddrichard,
• dirtpoor,
• DonCT,
• dude,
• ElSuenoFarms,
• exotion,
• gcon322,
• granville,
• groundkeeper,
• gt235,
• hoa.hoa251,
  
• huongdienabc2,
  
• huongdienabc3,
  
• huongnb4,
  
• huongpham784,
• ILENGINE,
• impalass,
• joe_t,
• joshs handyman,
• jp1961,
• kwak,
• lanceh5,
• lannam913,
• lawn mower fanatic,
• Lawnranger,
• littlefan,
• LoCo86,
• lyhoa914108,
  
• Mad Mackie,
• Malcolm Rypauf,
• mowerman05+,
• Mr. B.,
• Muhammad,
• Myamada1230,
• namlan761,
• Parkmower,
• pastorbud,
• pham.huong164
• Phamhuong806,
• plateauman57,
• PVHIII+,
• reynoldston,
• rich97jr,
• SawDoc441,
• snapperman57,
• soixamxamac8,
• Stevie-Ray,
• tava894,
• Tdog,
• thut438,
• tonypolston,
• Two-Stroke,
• WGR,
• yen.yen16,
• yyen235

That's worse than I thought! :ashamed:

lawn mower fanatic said:

That's worse than I thought! :ashamed:

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Honestly it's worse than anyone thinks.:frown:

lawn mower fanatic said:

And you can tell they are related because they all start with the same letter...today it's 'h' (and similar names)! :confused2:

huongdienabc2, huongdienabc3, huongdienabc4, huongnb11, huongnb12,

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Xrumer software and a botnet with computer generated usernames, hence the similarities. Realistically, there's only one or two people behind this probably squatting in their hut in Kurdistan and hooked up to the web via a Vietnamese proxy server, but until Administration here gets off its dead as s and does some IP/country blocking, tweak this forum software and actually sets up and uses Spam-O-Matic as it was intended to be used, its just a slow slide into spam oblivion.

Ric said:

Honestly it's worse than anyone thinks.:frown:

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This is what happens when a forum owner is blind to a spam problem:

http://www.volvolution.com/forum/

Oh look, the forum no longer exists.
Was a darn good forum back in its day.

Take a look at this membership list from Lawncareforum.com where the administration gave up and left. Pages and pages of nothing but spammers.



Member List - Lawn Care Business and Landscaping Forums - Lawn Care Forum

Ric said:

Take a look at this membership list from Lawncareforum.com where the administration gave up and left. Pages and pages of nothing but spammers.View attachment 17871



Member List - Lawn Care Business and Landscaping Forums - Lawn Care Forum

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WOW! Thats horrible...it's like 99% spammy posts in the forum!

lawn mower fanatic said:

WOW! Thats horrible...it's like 99% spammy posts in the forum!

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Yeah it is horrible and it's really ashame because it didn't have to be that way but it's full blown spam forum now.

Ric on your list of spammers there are 2 names that have a + after the name, does that have a meaning of some sort because my name is one of them, thanks:confused2:

mowerman05 said:

Ric on your list of spammers there are 2 names that have a + after the name, does that have a meaning of some sort because my name is one of them, thanks:confused2:

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It means they are in your contacts.

Ric said:

Thursday morning 5.35 there are 18 members signed in 10 are spammers and 8 have already been banned and this is every day. The problem is we can ban members but we can't delete them from the forum so there still on the membership list and can sign in when ever they like. Deleted all of the accounts with .vn e-mail addresses; they're all spammers and that's fine but that's only a small percentage, what about all the others. You have at least one third of the membership here that are spammers, you have a number of members registered as many as two to six different times. The thing is one spammer breeds more spammers and it's only getting worse daily and it's to the point of the forum being flooded with spammers.

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lawn mower fanatic said:

It means they are in your contacts.

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Hey LMF do you remember this post I made and I Talked about members being or joining as many six times, here's an example.



and there has to be at least a dozen more members with multiple accounts.

Now that you point all of this out I believe more and more that this forum won't last long if something is not done...more than before you pointed out all of these examples. :confused3:

Ric said:

Hey LMF do you remember this post I made and I Talked about members being or joining as many six times, here's an example.

dgfirefly	10-16-2013	0		Homeowner (under 1 acre)	Oregon	Looking to Buy
dgfirefly	10-16-2013	0		Homeowner (under 1 acre)	Oregon	Looking to Buy
dgfirefly	10-16-2013	0		Homeowner (under 1 acre)	Oregon	Looking to Buy
dgfirefly	10-16-2013	0		Homeowner (under 1 acre)	Oregon	Looking to Buy
dgfirefly	10-16-2013	0		Homeowner (under 1 acre)	Oregon	Looking to Buy
dgfirefly	10-16-2013	0		Homeowner (under 1 acre)	Oregon	Looking to Buy :

and there has to be at least a dozen more members with multiple accounts.

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Forum software was never properly configured to disallow multiple single username accounts. Probably configured to also allow multiple username single email accounts.

lawn mower fanatic said:

Now that you point all of this out I believe more and more that this forum won't last long if something is not done...more than before you pointed out all of these examples. :confused3:

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What happened to the Arborsite will happen here in time.

Here's another example of spammers doubling up on there membership.

They need to fix that soon. One of those spammers might also be a hacker. If so it will destroy the site in no time.

davbell22602 said:

They need to fix that soon. One of those spammers might also be a hacker. If so it will destroy the site in no time.

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No hacker. If it is you would of seen much worse by now.

Management seems to be unwilling to get rid of spam accounts to maybe boost membership numbers for increased ad revenue? Nothing like a bit of deceit & dishonesty with inflated active forum participants when you have $$ rolling in. With the spam posts gone, there's only half the forum participation left hence less advertising revenue.

Not a whole lot going on this morning so I spent a little time in the membership list. Went through twenty pages of our newest members and found spammer listed on 17 of the 20 pages and this spammer Girl15T9x11 has joined our forum probably 15 or 20 times by just changing the numbers behind the name Girl. Now I have to wonder about what there is to find on the other 1100 pages of membership :ashamed::ashamed::ashamed:

Ric said:

...Now I have to wonder about what there is to find on the other 1100 pages of membership :ashamed::ashamed::ashamed:

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And how many members there REALLY are!

lawn mower fanatic said:

And how many members there REALLY are!

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The last time I looked according to our forums front page there are 35739 members but according to the membership pages 33935.

Ric said:

The last time I looked according to our forums front page there are 35739 members but according to the membership pages 33935.

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Yeah and how many legitament members....maybe 8,000-10,000?

lawn mower fanatic said:

Yeah and how many legitiment members....maybe 8,000-10,000?

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How many Legit members I don't know but probably not many. I can tell you that out of almost 36000 members there's only 11894 that have ever posted and that the top 30 posters here on the forum are responsible for better than about 52000 post of what the forum statistics say, and guess what you the top dog with I think over 5000 post of you own. :thumbsup:

Ric said:

How many Legit members I don't know but probably not many. I can tell you that out of almost 36000 members there's only 11894 that have ever posted and that the top 30 posters here on the forum are responsible for better than about 52000 post of what the forum statistics say, and guess what you the top dog with I think over 5000 post of you own. :thumbsup:

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Yeah--think about it, just the top 5 members on the forum have over 20,000 posts....that's a big portion of the total....so you know there aren't too many contributors to the forum. :frown:

lawn mower fanatic said:

Yeah--think about it, just the top 5 members on the forum have over 20,000 posts....that's a big portion of the total....so you know there aren't too many contributors to the forum. :frown:

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Yeah and there's a couple guys in there that haven't been on the forum in a couple of years.

lawn mower fanatic said:

And how many members there REALLY are!

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Some day I'm going to write a how-to book. "Banning by the first octet of the IP for fun & profit."

There's collateral damage, but its sure effective.

We need a reported post section so members can copy a link from the spam, and paste the post in a (report post section) to notify us exactly where the spam post is, or just leave the title of the section where they saw it.. I blasted 3 off the other day I cant stand spammers.

wjjones said:

We need a reported post section so members can copy a link from the spam, and paste the post in a (report post section) to notify us exactly where the spam post is, or just leave the title of the section where they saw it.. I blasted 3 off the other day I cant stand spammers.

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People can report a post using the icon right below the post (triangle with !).

wjjones said:

We need a reported post section so members can copy a link from the spam, and paste the post in a (report post section) to notify us exactly where the spam post is, or just leave the title of the section where they saw it.. I blasted 3 off the other day I cant stand spammers.

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You can report the post now, that's not the problem or the issue. The problem is we can't get rid of the spammer so he just keeps coming back. Have you read this whole thread?

lawn mower fanatic said:

People can report a post using the icon right below the post (triangle with !).

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Yeah but does it do any good, up until now it hasn't.

Thanks for the feedback on this issue. I understand that it is frustrating, most of all for the moderators but also for the members who see spam posts when they come in and before mods have deleted them. As others have mentioned, spam is an issue on virtually every forum online and if ignored, the issue will take over a forum and ultimately destroy the environment. I'm going to make sure that doesn't happen at LMF, though.

As of today, I have made some changes on the back end regarding new registrations. Later, we will be deleting all registrations from .vn e-mail addresses (after checking to make sure no real accounts are in that group). Also, we will look at other foreign extensions like .ru, .pk, .in, etc. Usually these are spammers since LMF is visited mostly by people in North America (with shout outs to our European and Oceanic members!).

Again, thanks for your feedback and suggestions... we hope to dramatically reduce spam starting today. :thumbsup:

Muhammad said:

Thanks for the feedback on this issue. I understand that it is frustrating, most of all for the moderators but also for the members who see spam posts when they come in and before mods have deleted them. As others have mentioned, spam is an issue on virtually every forum online and if ignored, the issue will take over a forum and ultimately destroy the environment. I'm going to make sure that doesn't happen at LMF, though.

As of today, I have made some changes on the back end regarding new registrations. Later, we will be deleting all registrations from .vn e-mail addresses (after checking to make sure no real accounts are in that group). Also, we will look at other foreign extensions like .ru, .pk, .in, etc. Usually these are spammers since LMF is visited mostly by people in North America (with shout outs to our European and Oceanic members!).

Again, thanks for your feedback and suggestions... we hope to dramatically reduce spam starting today. :thumbsup:

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Thanks for letting us know your "game plan" and please keep us posted with the progress that is made. :thumbsup:

lawn mower fanatic said:

Thanks for letting us know your "game plan" and please keep us posted with the progress that is made. :thumbsup:

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I think a good game plan would be to go back to when the forum started in 2010 and delete all the memberships that have never posted a message up until the beginning of 2012 those people have never participated in the forum and never will and IMO need to go away. Then I would hope to see the 2000 members or more that we have banned be deleted, then all the multiple memberships like the ones I posted here in this thread, which there are a lot of those that need to be deleted. If you accomplished all that at least 50% of your spammer problem would be removed or deleted making the rest of the forum clean up a lot easier and for those members who feel like they were bumped unjust they can re-register if they want to participate.

We've got about 3,000 accounts to remove in bulk... and then there are probably 2,000+ that we want to remove but in order to do so quickly, we need to make some customizations to the admin/mod features of the forum to enable quick and easy user banning/deletion. Right now it's a painstaking process to delete lots of users.

I checked registrations over the past 24 hours and it seems that no spammers have registered since we made the initial back-end changes and registration restrictions.

Here's a double and a spammer from yesterday

Something else you may want to consider is to set up your forum for Auto membership pruning as well as message pruning set them both for like 60 or 90 days. That way it will automatically prune a member if he is not participated or posted within 60 or 90 days of membership or joining they are removed and if a message or post doesn't have a response within the 60 to 90 day time period it's automatically removed. Save a lot of work.

Ric said:

Here's a double and a spammer from yesterday

leetunletun	Yesterday	0		Homeowner (50+ acres)	Missouri	Looking to Buy
leetunletun	Yesterday	0		Homeowner (under 1 acre)	District of Columbia	Walker
xw5gu2xk2	Yesterday	0		Homeowner (under 1 acre)	pqrst90970	klmno08061

ruffrage1

Yesterday

0

Homeowner (under 1 acre)

ruffrage1

ruffrage1

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I believe those came in before I made the changes.

As for membership pruning, we've always avoided that as from time to time members to come back and then on the support side we get e-mails asking why they can't log in. It piles up over the years. So we'll delete spammers but not inactive accounts.

Muhammad said:

I believe those came in before I made the changes.

As for membership pruning, we've always avoided that as from time to time members to come back and then on the support side we get e-mails asking why they can't log in. It piles up over the years. So we'll delete spammers but not inactive accounts.

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As far as deleting inactive accounts goes, if an inactive account such as or like Jd Green or Twall with postings or some type of participation yes I'd leave them alone but when some who has joined in 2010 or 2011 and has not posted a message or participated in the forum in anyway up till now I would say that was a little more than an inactive member. We need to fill the forum with active participating members not dead wood JMO.

One banned, Three new spammers logged on this morning so far at 5:00am

• -Tsunami-*,
• alonetezuneo,
• bluegirl,
• churojoure,
• EngineMan,
• Hustling,
• KELLY80621,
• KennyV,
• Muhammad,
• robinhelu,
• tranhvcatn,
• Two-Stroke

Muhammad said:

As of today, I have made some changes on the back end regarding new registrations. Later, we will be deleting all registrations from .vn e-mail addresses (after checking to make sure no real accounts are in that group). Also, we will look at other foreign extensions like .ru, .pk, .in, etc. Usually these are spammers since LMF is visited mostly by people in North America (with shout outs to our European and Oceanic members!).

Click to expand...

I would think and speaking from experience, you could blanket ban countries such as China, Bangladesh, Pakistan, India, Vietnam, Iran, Kurdistan, etc. and also get rid of any and all accounts with IP's actually or by proxy originating from the same. I wouldn't think there's much demand for zero-turn information from some Pakistani, etc. living in a hut somewhere.

buzzzmeister said:

I would think and speaking from experience, you could blanket ban countries such as China, Bangladesh, Pakistan, India, Vietnam, Iran, Kurdistan, etc. and also get rid of any and all accounts with IP's actually or by proxy originating from the same. I wouldn't think there's much demand for zero-turn information from some Pakistani, etc. living in a hut somewhere.

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I just moved two spam post to the moderator messages to get them off the forum. What ever changes were made apparently aren't working well.

Muhammad said:

We've got about 3,000 accounts to remove in bulk... and then there are probably 2,000+ that we want to remove but in order to do so quickly, we need to make some customizations to the admin/mod features of the forum to enable quick and easy user banning/deletion. Right now it's a painstaking process to delete lots of users.

Click to expand...

I have a plug-in on my vB3.8.x software that allows several options for bulk deletion. You can delete by a range of dates, by similar username, by similar/same email, by any variation of IP (whole IP or by octet) and a few others I've never used.

You should also configure to disallow duplicate accounts by the same email and by concurrent usernames. (smith1, smith2, etc.)

Ric said:

I just moved two spam post to the moderator messages to get them off the forum. What ever changes were made apparently aren't working well.

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Temporary moderator approved sign-up or putting a new member's first, say 10 posts, in a moderator queue would be a good thing until any bugs are worked out.

Just looking at my StopForumSpam logs for the month of October and it shows 349,887 attempts to sign up on my forum so far this month by known spam accounts and I got *yawn* nothing that got through since early August.

And every single account that's made also gets a background check. Some days I get 5 new members, some days I get 50.

Ric said:

I just moved two spam post to the moderator messages to get them off the forum. What ever changes were made apparently aren't working well.

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First step is to seal the borders. Then we'll deal with the spammers that are already in.

Muhammad said:

First step is to seal the borders. Then we'll deal with the spammers that are already in.

Click to expand...

Sounds like the Border Patrol dealing with illegal immigrants:0)

djdicetn said:

Sounds like the Border Patrol dealing with illegal immigrants:0)

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The thing about sealing the boarders is that it's something that can't be done. There will always be a way or they will find a way to get in.
If you delete the ones we have, shoot them down the ones trying to cross the others will know that we wont tolerate them coming across the boarder. There is no 100% fix.

Yeah, it will never be 100% ... but we've only been at about 80% recently. So if we can get to 99% and only a few per month can get in then I'd be happy.

Muhammad said:

Yeah, it will never be 100% ... but we've only been at about 80% recently. So if we can get to 99% and only a few per month can get in then I'd be happy.

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Yeah I know they'll never be a 100% fix and if your getting 80% you can consider yourself lucky but I'm at a loss. Your working on trying to seal the boarders as you say and that's great but we have five Administrators here on this forum and it seems to me if you put them to work deleting the spammers while your sealing the boarders between all of you, you could have the spammers deleted in a matter of days. The other thing is you appointed moderators and if they or we would have had access to do the job we were put here to do you wouldn't have the problem you have now.