Messageboard Account Cleanup

[Gregg Machel]

All,
I have recently cleaned up a lot of spammer accounts advertising various products that do not have anything to do with fishing. It is quite possible that I have deleted a legitimate account because I removed about 200 accounts. If I did delete your account, my appologies. All you need to do is create another account. I did look for accounts that had posted messages and usually did not remove them unless it was obvious that it was a spammer. Just wanted to give you all a heads up in case you are having trouble logging in. Feel free to send me an email if you have any problems logging in or with the message board.

[Flyjunkie]

GREGG,

Very good... I've noticed on other Boards I post that there are a Bunch of User Names that have never posted or maybe only posted once, shortly after they signed on.. And for some reason their User names remain...
I've always thought that it would be a Good idea if the Administrator and Moderators would go in and delete them... (even thought they don't really cause much problems) doesn't it eat up Website space to leave them in the Listing???

Very good Job there...and having had to deal with 200 of them and Delete them...you've got my Sympathy for the work that went it doing it.... :wink:

Kudos and Thank You......


DEAN ~ 8) 8)

[Gregg Machel]

It doesn't really take up all that much space, but it's always nice to know how many users signed up for the forum to give us an idea how big our community is here. I don't consider advertisers of viagra and all kinds of other products legit members, so I delete them as soon as I see them. They are going to the more popular sites and putting up their links in their profile thinking it will get them a higher search engine ranking.

If you do a search on "Fly Shop" in google and yahoo, you will find that this site ranks very high. We have been all the way up to #1 on both, and currently are between 5-10 I think. This may be why we are getting spammed.

[Bill Kiene semi-retired]

Thanks Gregg.

[Troutnut]

Gregg,

I used to run a PHPBB on my site and I had the same problem with lots of viagra/poker spam. Not only are they not legitimate users -- they aren't people! They're robot programs the spammers set loose to crawl the web looking for a PHPBB and then sign in and post automatically (since they have the names of the forms and everything programmed into them).

It helps to be running the latest version of the forum. You might want to enable some of the verification features too, besides email verification (some of the robots seem to be able to handle that). There should be a checkbox somewhere that makes people fill in a few letters/numbers from one of those auto-generated distorted images that the robots can't read. It might be called "image verification." It's a small extra hassle and only on signup, but it might help you get rid of the spam problem.