Site Registration

[intric8]

Over the past few months, the site has been inundated with spammer accounts and posts. They've grown incredibly insidious.

In many cases, in order to avoid detection they will create an account and then post something. The post on day 1 will look seemingly real and harmless. But then after a couple of days the spammers will return and edit their posts and insert invisible URLs. They do this purely to try and improve the Search rankings of their crappy websites or those of their clients.

It's ridiculous.

I've considered removing the Edit Post functionality after a certain timeframe. But for now - at least for the next 2 weeks during the holidays - I've decided to go with the "nuclear option" of removing site registrations entirely. I'll bring back the feature in a couple of weeks (most likely) and realize there are definitely still spammer accounts in the system that will come back and create more fake comments and insert more garbage.

But it's going to really stop the flow big time. And I for one look forward to not obsessing about it so much.

For the next two weeks our little community is locked down. We can all still login and do whatever we want to do. Just no newbies.

[intric8]

Update:

I've also decided to put a 60-minute limit to Editing posts.

Let me know if anyone has an issue with that.

I've also made it so that any time a post is edited, in theory it should get some sort of visual indicator.

[finrock]

Let me know if anyone has an issue with that.

No issues whatsoever. Sorry you have to deal with such nonsense. Once again, thank you for keeping this wonderful community in such good shape!

[3D-vice]

No issues so far! It's a shame that forum operators like you have to deal with 'beeep' like this. Anyway: Thank you so muc for your hard work on keeping this awesome place clean!

[Appee]

If we lose edit, it'll be fine. We'll just have to proof read better. Thanks for creating and maintaining our community.

[Zippy Zapp]

Dang spammers and SEO wannabes. That's a reasonable solution, especially this time of year.

[intric8]

I've reopened site registration for the time being. It's been nice not dealing with spammers for the past 3 weeks but there are a couple of people that wanted to join that were prevented. So I'm opening the door again for a while.

[intric8]

Some (probably too early) tentative good news.

A few days ago I made some additional changes to site registration in addition to the post editing time limits mentioned earlier. Since then it has been eerily quiet on the spam/reg front. That's actually really good news if the trend holds. Prior to my changes I could guarantee 2-3 spambot accounts per day would infect the site, oftentimes in very confusing ways. So far so good!