SPAM and Unused accounts

[rmattson]

Hey all. A few weeks ago enevala notified me that there was some spam showing up on the board. I cleaned them up and when more appeared I changed the registration verification method to admin. Over the course of the next weeks I received a ton of registration requests. All junk. Looks like some genius decided to single out this forum as they had defeated even the authorization question along with the captcha. I changed the question and in the next week or two will be attempting to upgrade the forum software to the latest version as well as putting in a more secure captcha.

I will be leaving the activation method on admin until I am sure the registration is secure again.

This morning I installed an additional tool for user administration (cleaning up 100's of spam accounts one at a time isn't very efficient) and wiped out all of the spam accounts I could single out as well as any accounts that registered in the last few weeks and were not activated. I also removed a few accounts that had registered before 2008 and were also never activated.

If anyone notices anything funny, please hollar.
Thanks.

[enevala]

Thanks for managing the cleanup, and for taking care of the board!

Eric

[Ken Roberts]

Thanks for giving attention to this.

My view is: Don't go nuts about eliminating every possibility of spam. It's just part of modern life.

More important to
(a) make it easy for enthusiastic new skiers to join,
(b) make it not too much work for administrators.

What's really critical for this group is to build energy around skiing.

Ken

[Montana]

exrender,
Thanks for handling this ever present problem.

A forum with a bunch of spam will not be read. Regular members will go elsewhere. I know a lot of forum where spam is not a problem. It just has to be managed. If we want to have a forum that builds energy around skiing then spam must be controlled.

[Phil]

montana, thanks as well from my side. I was wondering about all those spam mails lately. if you need any help, just let me know.

[rmattson]

Whoops. Looks like I missed some account during the cleanup. I stripped off a whole bunch more this morning. My apologies if any of them were real people but on some it's hard to tell a real user from the spam accounts in some cases. I think we're ok though. Had a nice bout of posts from a single account this AM. Perhaps it was pissed that we're tightening up the ship because they posted in every section at least twice. Anyhoo they are all cleaned up now. Hopefully we're close to eliminating all those accounts.

[rmattson]

I had a few more accounts sneak in so I've re-enabled admin approval for new memberships.