More tech-boy info on weeding out evil, and occasionally spamming truth and light
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. Things such as blocking IP addresses, prohibited keywords, etc. that Selil touched on.
