New users now have to be verified first

[mattadams]

Spammers used to just be a nuisance, one would sign up ever week or so, I'd delete the account, we'd go on with our lives. Unfortunately now it seems they've decided to become more and more annoying. Rather than just posting deals on viagra or links to porno sites, they are posting pornographic pictures (and not good ones either!) and often I'm waking up in the morning to 3 or 4 new accounts created by spammers. Previously they had to recognize an image and pass email verification before they could post, but apparently instead of using robots to do the registration process, either they taught the robots better, or they started actually having humans do it.
Finally having enough, I decided to make it so no members could register for the forums without jumping through a few hoops. They still have to recognize the image at the beginning with the characters, they still have to pass email verification but now once they pass email verification it will send me an email and I can decide whether to approve them or not.
Hopefully this will help eliminate (or at least cut down dramatically) the spam.

[Warrlord]

Cool, I hope it works for ya. Too bad those spammers made you have to do extra work.

[Walking Eagle]

I noticed the increase the last couple of weeks also. I deleted a handful, heck one even shocked me about a week ago.

[thesoundmaster]

last night i saw 2 pop up, one with a rather nasty image on the thread it started. Glad to see they'll dissappear, just sucks for the extra work.

[RevT]

Damn...I'm missing the pron? What in the hell bobby?

Guess i need to get up earlier than you....

RevT

[mattadams]

Trust me, its never good porn.

[RevT]

Trust me, its never good porn.

But I'm sure it leads to good stuff!!

Brian

[mattadams]

If it were that good, they wouldn't hav eto spam it to random forums! LOL.

[Tilt168]

just saying....if we make it too hard to join that might turn ppl off from joining....i have no problem with it but some might not be as....dedicated (ok crazy obsessed with fords) as us lol!

[mattadams]

meh the process for joining is still exactly the same, they just can't post until I authorize them. Unless they sign up right as I go to bed, it shouldn't take more than a few hours to get them signed up By that time, they've already put all ther info in, etc. anyways :).

[Hypoid]

One more step won't hurt me, I'm already registered. LOL

I've done this for other forums, didin't hurt my feelings at all. If you want a credit card # for me to join, we might have issues...NOT! We won't go there and insist that it never occured to us that we could. ;)

[mattadams]

I don't know what it is with these spammers lately, but I'm glad I"ve decided to restrict access, its been a lot less stressful. I would guess I've been deleting 10-15 accounts per day, and 10-15 accounts per day on the maxfund volunteers forum. I can always tell they are completely random spammers when the same user signs up for both maxfundvolunteers.org and rmftc.com, even though they are on different software, completely different servers, and no links that connect the two to each other at all. What sucks is on each site I've got about 50-60 domain names that are banned from registering here, and it just continues to grow. For example, no one is allowed to register if they are using an email like whatever@ramireschat.com (one of the most recent domain names to be banned) it won't let them register... they just keep coming up with different domains though LOL.

[rwmorrisonjr]

Unfortunately, that's the game the spammers play. The only way to truly keep them off is to either make them register with non-free domains (no Gmail, Hotmail, etc.) or make them use a credit card for validation. Either way, it sucks.

[mattadams]

most of them aren't the "free" domains but "foreign" domains, i.e. I go to the domain to see what it is and it is all in arabic or japanese.

[Mind_Boggler]

ahh to be one o' the original RMFTC'ers!