Topic: Forum registration back online

[kat]

Registration is now back online

Due to the massive increase in spam hitting the site and registering accounts new sign-ups have been disabled. Whilst this function is offline you can get in touch by email to have an account manually created for you. Email abuseATkatsbitsDOTcom

[ratty redemption]

sorry to hear about that kat, but i do think your being sensible manually setting up new accounts.

[kat]

Thanks Ratty. New accounts have always been manually checked but this recent spate of spam registrations is using up far too much time to manage, in the past few days the forum has been hit with close to 300 registrations and only two of those pass the grade.

[ratty redemption]

your welcome kat, and wow, that's an insane amount, were they all for advertising via your forums?

[kat]

Pretty much that's all spam accounts are for, linkbacks to other places - it's not always used to sell anything as it's typically just to generate inbound traffic to other sites which is then monetised through things like paid adverts.

[ratty redemption]

interesting, and do these spam accounts and posts ever look legit? how hard are they to spot from normal users who might have sigs which link to other sites? i'm not doubting your judgement, just curious how blatant the spam ones are.

[kat]

They are relatively easy to spot yes, but they do have to be checked because people have a tendency to use funny words for their account user names. I don't want to go into it too deeply as it'll probably attract more of the pests but suffice to say they don't all register to post and not all registrations are scripts, the ones that get past captchas are people being paid to do it (like gold farmers in the likes of WoW).

[ratty redemption]

understood, i think and good luck dealing with them.

[cpdt]

Just testing Facebook account log-in. Seems to work OK. Users can now sign into the forum using FB and sync account info.

[silicone_milk]

Neat. Have you considered getting this working with Google+ as well?

[kat]

If there's a mod for it yes. I've found one for Twitter so will be looking at that in the meantime.