PureBasic Forums - English

Ladies, Gents, I dunno' about you all, but I have decided to cut back on my use of this forum. The reason? I can no longer stand the amount of spam here. I'll drop in occaisionally, but my annoyance with the increasing amount of spam has reached the point where I can no longer tolerate it.

I hope the PB devs spend some time on fixing the forum, as it is a key element in the acceptance, support, and reputation of PureBasic. If I would be a new potential customer to PureBasic, and I would see the amount of spam, I'd be thinking nobody would case about the forum, thus nobody would care about the language, thus I would not buy it.

My apologies for the harsh words, but if a forum like this cannot be kept spam free, or perhaps better put is not deemed important enough to keep spam free, then I am starting to get worried about the future...

I do hope I am wrong...

Of course, this is all IMHO, I might be wrong, my personal opionion, etcetera, but I just cannot stand it anymore, the frustration had to go somewhere... This is not an attack directed towards the developers of PureBasic (they're doing a great job) nor towards the moderators of this board (who are just as much a victim as the rest of us). Again, my apologies, but I've just had it for now.

Please do calm down again.

Most of the spam is allready cleaned up.

Some of those I saw, all done from the same account,
did look to me more like agent provocateur
trying to disrupt the forum,
than an actuall intension to sell anything, btw.

If there is any necessity to attack anyone at all,
it should rather be those "breaking the glass",
then those cleaning up.

I actually agree with you bluenl... The spam is getting very annoying, some of it is pure filth... and just looking through the member list shows links to all manner of porn and medications to make your "gentleman sausage" bigger.

Something really does need to be done, even if the moderators have to manually authorise new members. I just don't know how much more of this I can take either?

Marlin wrote:Most of the spam is allready cleaned up.

no, it isn't. See the memberlist: http://www.purebasic.fr/english/memberl ... &sk=c&sd=d

Greetings ... Kiffi

Hell yeah!

I'm kind of astonished presuming you to be an old hand, not to be stressed out by a periodical high tide of spamflood. (always regarding it's worse on other places)

Yes, I find this recently uprisen amount of spam very unusual to this forum and find it quite disturbing as well. Besides it's just dull standing in the way.
I try to coupe with it while thinking that the support is hunting for the perpetrator backstage.

To me it seems it's one and the same sender, as the namestyles and habits are so similar.

What worries me more, is that people become increasingly nervously alerted towards any newcomer whose requests are not obvious pure enough. This kind of poisens the open-hearted dealings which are common on this place.

Another not so obvious point is the pollution of the members list. Not caring about keeping this halfway 'pure' means an abasement of membership and as deduction to the members themselves.

To me this is only annoying at the moment, but if your consequence is to lessen your presence and inevitable support it changes into a state latent danger.

please don't let it scare you / us away

Vera

Kiffi wrote:

Marlin wrote:Most of the spam is allready cleaned up.

no, it isn't. See the memberlist: http://www.purebasic.fr/english/memberl ... &sk=c&sd=d

Greetings ... Kiffi

I admit, that most of them look suspicious and could turn out to be causing trouble.

I do not like garbage (I would not even call most of it spam) to be fooding this forum,
and I do not say, that nothing should be done at all.

But, if I could not help but to be mad, I'd rather be mad at the causers of this garbage,
not at the forum, to some degree "victimized" by it.

Besides, I trust, that it will come out all right;
not to say that this discussion could not contribute and/or stimulate some sensible improvements.

Letting only humans (= not bots) create accounts seems sensible to me,
but that can not protect from malvolent humans causing trouble.

Better live a little dangerous, than not at all;
solve, what you can, in sensible ways.

And try not to attack the wrong people.

I vote for manual approval for posting.

phpbb is free software and its easy to be affected when something is so freely popular. I know there are add-ons etc that can help make things easier to manage. It's a question of what kind fits the forum.. If not already possible, I think all forums should be read-only access unless you are in the approved poster list.

Doom9 forums for instance, make you wait several days before you can post, and some forums have options to put users on moderation requiring their posts to be approved prior to be allowed onto the Live Forum.


There are all kinds of methods to curb the spam/trash, that don't require insane amounts of extra attention. We just have to research them is all.

I have to say I don't see a lot of the spam, even when I come back to the forum frequently. So they must be doing a half decent job at containment.

I think something will have to be done soon after looking at the amount of spammers registered and judging from the amount, they're most likely bots.
A captcha on the registration would probably reduce it by 95% and it's only a 10 minute job to set up.

idle wrote:A captcha on the registration would probably reduce it by 95% and it's only a 10 minute job to set up.

It already is set up for that. I had to pass a captcha to register.

Maybe renaming the filenames on the server would help. Those bots are searching for "posting.php", "viewforum.php", "viewtopic.php" afaik to identify if its a phpBB or such.

My ISP has a user forum which they seem to have controlled very nicely. How this works is we have our standard user name / pass which allows us to log in to check pm's, etc, but when we want to create a post we have to enter our isp username / pass before we can do this. ( Effectively we need 2 log in's to be able to post any messages. )
Maybe this forum could have a similar thing set up as a temporary thing for new users such as username_newuser as a 2nd username for new users with less than x number of posts?
After a certain number of legitimate posts this restriction could be lifted.

C64 wrote:

idle wrote:A captcha on the registration would probably reduce it by 95% and it's only a 10 minute job to set up.

It already is set up for that. I had to pass a captcha to register.

I had the same problem in my forum, but I just replaced the captcha with one I made myself and that fixed the problem (for some time).

I just discovered that registration has been disabled, so I guess they're looking into the issue.

http://www.purebasic.fr/english/ucp.php?mode=register

Trond wrote:I just discovered that registration has been disabled

http://www.purebasic.fr/english/ucp.php?mode=register

Maybe because yesterday the forum was attacked by some idiot who made a bot.

The Total Commander forum has a special sub forum that is intended to act as spam trap. I don't know how well it works. However, I think Mr. Ghisler is willing to report about his experiences, if someone asks him.

Regards, Little John