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Paul
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« on: April 15, 2007, 11:20:21 PM » |
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Please be patient. Your account will be working within a few hours.
In the past few months, online forums have been hit increasingly hard by spammers. Most of the spam posts contain pornographic and prescription drug links. These spammers started out slowly by creating new topics with obviously out-of-place titles and were relatively easy to remove. More recently, they have begun posting within existing posts which takes a lot more time and effort to remove.
You may ask, "Why are spammers doing this? What could they possibly gain?" Well, they don't actually get many hits off of the links within the posts. What they do get is better search engine ranking which is what they are really after. If they happen to have two posts in AquaticFreakshow.com when it gets indexed by Google for instance, that will be two more direct links to that spammer's site that Google will record. The more other sites that are linked to their site, the higher their ranking will be when someone searches for what they are trying to sell.
Anyway, this whole thing spells bad news for all online forums. Most forum platforms have security built in to try catching the spammers when they attempt to register. In the past, most spammer-related activity has been carried out by bots (or "autonomous" software designed to perform specific tasks quickly and without human intervention).
Most forum platforms now have the option for admins to require users to type in a string of scrambled random characters gathered from a picture file that is displayed near the end of the registration process. This weeds out a lot of the bot activity because it requires a higher level of visual discernment than most lower-level optical character recognition (OCR) software can handle. Unfortunately, some recent spammers are either more advanced bots with more advanced OCR software or they are actual persons sitting in front of a computer. This obviously renders the above security step useless.
Most platforms also allow the admins to require email activation after registration before a user can post. After registration, the user is sent an email to the address he or she specified asking for the account to be activated by clicking a link within the email. Once this is done, the account is active and the user can post to the forum. Again, this weeds out low-level bots, but is useless against more advanced bots and human spammers.
For now, the last line of defense is for all new registrations to require admin activation. This means that after a user registers, an activation email is sent to the admins. Until the account is activated by an admin, the user is unable to post. This can end up being a lot of work for the admins and can be frustrating for new users, but it is not as time-consuming as cleaning up after a big spam attack and in the end it results in a cleaner forum.
Unfortunately, AquaticFreakshow.com has had to adopt this last line of defense. All previous security measures have failed. Until phpBB and/or other forum platforms have developed a better way to avoid these spam attacks, we will have to stick with this level of security. We apologize for any inconvenience and we thank you for your patience.
Paul
Site Admin
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