Spring Cleaning

[Steve Herschbach]

I got wise to another spamming technique. It is easy to spot spammers when they post. But now they like to join forums just to create a member page. Then they put lots of links on the page to various websites. You never see the links unless you visit their member page. However, since our website is very popular it boosts their search rating with the search engines which are calculated in part by how many legitimate sites link to them.

So I spent a couple hours this morning housecleaning - the forum. If you registered before February 1st but have never posted I looked at you account. If no activity since day of registering you got deleted. These guys register, create an account, and move on so there is normally no activity after the registration date.

The only older non-active accounts that survived were ones with names I recognized or which for some reason appeared legit. Spammer names look computer generated and so real person accounts are fairly easy to spot.

A rather surprising number of people register but never post. So they can see the pictures I guess, which unregistered people cannot see. Going forward I will be adding more features that only registered members can use so that may become more common. Though it would be nice if you lurkers would throw in your two cents every once in a while.

Then, I checked every account that has been registered since February 1st and if the have been no posts and the account signature has any links then the account was deleted.

A few innocent bystanders may have gone down in the resulting slaughter but if so it was people not logging in anyway. But if I did accidentally knock out a valid person I apologize. Go ahead and re-register.

This knocked down to 726 REAL forum members, 426 of which are active, which means the member has visited in the last 90 days.

I will be screening new members more aggressively in the future. Many forums let this kind of stuff go as it boosts their forum numbers. I have a thing about spammers so I will delete them when I find them. If it gets to be too much of a burden I will have to shut off the ability to puts links in signatures. Only a few of us do that anyway but it is a feature the spammers love. If it goes away so will they. But for now I will just root them out. There are some filters I can employ also if I need to.

Working on a new photo album for the forums as the one built in is not much good in my opinion. And a neat setup where people can show off their equipment. Coming soon!

[DavidRamey]

I saw the Spring Cleaning and thought you were getting ready for a SALE! You do a good job getting rid of the spammers. Thanks.