Staying Alive

[San Vizaj]

Just posting something so that my account doesn't get purged. I do music as a hobby, when I find the time between my 9-5 job and playing football.

[LivePsy]

I'm not interested in my job or football, but I also need to post something or get purged through inactivity. So we do have something in common after all...

Cheers,
B

[Timo]

Evenin San, Psy!

Psy, only inactive accounts (old accounts with no posts whatsoever) stand to be erased. Anyone with 1 post or more is deemed active, even if they regged in 2002. Not sure why people register and don't post? You don't even need to reg to search.

But the reason being, had an influx of bots registering recently for: 1) spamming the board (the only reason they didn't visually spam all over the place was due to us switching to manual activation until I figured out how to squish them to pulp automatically), and 2) professional spammers/robots creating loads of accounts just to tag their website to the account profiles - Google/Yahoo search spiders read user profiles, so if the spammers crawl the web and do this on countless forums it boosts their search rankings.

Increased security 14 days ago now, and the logs show that 1800 attempted bots have been stopped from registering here in that period.

They call it "Search Engine Optimisation". I call it spamming of the highest order. Either way this is the newest technique spammers are using to increase their site rankings and is big business, hence the recent sudden influx.

All contained now though, and everything's back on automatic, thankfully. (Was fucking mind-numbingly boring sifting through them all looking for legit registrants!!).

The purge is to rid previous bot accounts and other inactive accounts with 0 posts, to tidy things up again.

Happy festivities, gents!

[merlin]

Right....I am not a bot

sounds convincing doesn't it?

M.

[LivePsy]

Originally Posted by Timo

Evenin San, Psy!

They call it "Search Engine Optimisation". I call it spamming of the highest order.

I know of another board which is completely off the air because of massive amounts of bot registrations - no, not virusti.com Computer are good, its the work of evil people which is bad.

BF

[Timo]

Infekted would have been deluged too, but was forced to stick the registration process into into manual mode (manually moderating registrants before they are activated to post) temporarily and running IP checks on new users for three weeks while scratching my head, but the number of bots trying to register has ramped up exponentially since then. Wouldn't've been able to keep up manually registering users.
The robots circumvent both CAPTCHAs and email activations, processes which usually stopped robots in the past.

Located the source of one of the spamming bastards, and am currently trying to get his website shut down due to misuse of terms and conditions of the domains/hosts he's registered with. Even if successful I have no doubt he'd just switch to another domain host extremely quickly. A lost cause. On the other hand, if lucky, the domain/host may sue his ass.

Either way, Infekted is protected for now and has been placed back on automated registration for the last couple of weeks with no probs. w00t. Need a couple of extra tricks up my sleeve just in case, though.

HO ho ho, oh the fun.

[LivePsy]

Thanks for all the work you're putting in! Maybe there will be something you have been asking for at the Access booth winter Namm

[Monobeat]

I love staying alive.... vs. staying dead.