No mercy

[SWCAdmin]

OK, so as I diligently slaved away trying to clean the lists of unverified members in order to streamline the functioning of this establishement and otherwise unselfishly further the national defense, I made one tiny check-box sized mistake. And launched a frivolous e-mail to all members. It now looks like my frantic plug pulling worked better than I thought, as only about 1/2 of you got the round trip of the mistake and the retraction. The other 1/2 only got my "I didn't mean to send that" note and were left wondering what the original faux pas was.

In response to my "oops" & mea culpa...


Sorry all. Mistakenly spammed everyone with a registration reminder that was intended to go only to those whose registration has been hanging fire. A little power is a dangerous thing.

You can safely delete that.

I shouldn't have had that 3 martini lunch. Willl do some push ups in a moment.

....here are some of the counter-snipes. Tough crowd. Clearly our membership is full of some experienced alcoholics and screw-ups.

Next time, go for the straight bourbon.
Just do push ups till we get tired!!!!
Next time, make it a four martini lunch. That way, if you screw up
again you won't even care.
Just say Semper Fi -- 500 times and we will forgive you.
Nice verification message! And I could use a three martini lunch right about now....
[Noting] your large frame...making push-ups a bit more challenging. To accomodate for this imbalance, add 50 to the current punative lot and call it even.
Try not to add to the martini total on the down stroke
Get on down!

[Tom Odom]

And what you sent me last time I responded to a "New Private Message at Small Wars Council":


Did you brain fart reply to the e-mail notification of a PM?

I live voyeuristically that way.

I clearly missed an opportunity but I am relieved the rest of the council set you straight...:D

Tom

[SWCAdmin]

Well, I guess what goes around comes around. :o

More fun than the PC docile sheep-like drone wrapper around a weasely back-stabbing chewy center of so much of our society!

And I do get a lot of voyeurism from folks who reply to those "you've got a PM" email notifications (you know, the DO NOT REPLY TO ME ones). Unfortunately, though cheap, they are rarely that thrilling.

[Stan]

I received the apology, but not the eviction notice :)

I am wondering what you meant about the clean-up of unverified users. We have a forum over here in Estonia and are being attacked by porn sellers.

They register, never post and the URL they list is normally some porn site.

We've been blocking those that do post (merely citing their websites) but that could take forever and they simply reregister under another email address.

What then is a verified user ? How do you approach this situation ? Individually, or globally like with last night's 'tiny check-box sized mistake' ?

Regards, Stan

[selil]

Stan, you can harvest their IP's and start blocking those. There are lists on the Internet of IP's to block as known SPAM relays. You can also put in Captcha's and lock down the forum from posting URL's without verification of the URL. You can even block certain words from being URL's with the filters built into web forum software.

The number one thing you can do is block unregistered users from posting. The second thing is make the verification process either encrypted (using HTTPS) or human intensive (using automation and captchas) so that robots can't be used to post.

[J Wolfsberger]

I didn't get either one. Is that a hint?

[SWCAdmin]

A little background for those few that care, and to outline some of the background stuff that Stan's question raises. For the vast majority, this is boring crap, move on to some content posts.

As I used it in this thread, an "unverified" user is someone who took the first step of signing up for the Council, but then never confirmed their e-mail by clicking on the verification link that comes back to them. In other words, they were only 1/2 registered. There were about 25 of them at the time, hanging fire in an "awaiting confirmation" group that we need to clean up every now and then. (Sidebar, my mistake was not deselecting the registered, i.e. verified, user group when I pulled that trigger)

That e-mail verification, plus the image verification before that, are two techniques to combat spam. They pretty effectively weed out the computer-generated spammers.

Sounds like Stan's board has some real live warm body spammers. Who can obviously confirm the image and confirm an e-mail. They only way to get rid of them is through active moderation. We have a great crew here who quickly smack down the pornmeisters, iPod sellers, and Nigerian bankers in need of a front man that pop up here.

If you are having trouble on your board, the two options are:
- get busy with more or better moderators, for the revenge moderation technique we are using
- change your board settings so that new members require positive moderation before they are let in. Slows down their join, might douse the creative juices, and may still let in some riff raff. We don't do that.

We couldn't be more pleased with vBulletin, our software package for the Small Wars Council. If you're not getting the features you need to spank the spammers, take a look at www.vbulletin.com (http://www.vbulletin.com). Things such as blocking IP addresses, prohibited keywords, etc. that Selil touched on.

[SWCAdmin]

I didn't get either one. Is that a hint?
Who said that? How did he get in here? ;)

You probably have your UserCP set to not receive admin e-mails. I did not over-ride that for the 2nd "sorry" e-mail, so you would not have received. I did over-ride that setting for the 1st "register, you lazy..." e-mail, but I probably pulled the plug before it got to sending to you.

You're posting now, not to worry, all is good.

And enough of this process stuff for me right now. I've got to go do some real work.

[Stan]

Bill and Selil, Thanks.


Sounds like Stan's board has some real live warm body spammers. Who can obviously confirm the image and confirm an e-mail.

Indeed they are. Worse, most are coming from the U.S.

The Nigerians gave up :D

I've forwarded your recommendations to our editor in Finland.

Regards, Stan