Spam

[admin]

We've been having a bit of trouble with passport related spam over the past week or so.

I'll implement some more anti-spam measures shortly - one partial measure will be to extend/change the signup questions/captcha type thing that currently exist. These are of the type "finish this word: Somebeachsome....."

Ideally these are something that a normal harness fan from anywhere in the world would know off the top of their head but might be hard for a bot or somebody getting paid $1 an hour to figure out.

If anybody would like to help please PM me with any questions that fit the bill.

[Messenger]

Lately I have been making pre-emptive strikes against new members whom I see as more likely spammers than harness fans
I do this by giving them a 30 day ban if they don't supply their real name (or anything resembling a real name )
If they have already posted spam or go onto post spam I give them a life ban
Lately it is not unusual to see more banned members listed as being online than legitimate ones (not that they can post or anything)

A search of our Members List tells me that 1166 of our members have never posted - not that there is any requirement to do so. That leaves <1,000 members who have posted

What puzzles me is why some of these non-posters have sometimes had over two thousand visits to their profile and it isn't the member them self as sometimes they have not been active for several years.
Just as I suspect some of our supposed members are Bots (robots), I thought these visits may have been from bots. Naturally the longer someone has been a member, the more visits they are likely to have had but the inconsistency is surprising ie. One 2011 member may have had 700 visits while another 2011 member may have had 2500. Why such a difference when neither has posted anything to pique visitors interest and I cannot find anything to suggest their chosen name has anything to do with it
If anyone has any theories, please tell

We exist for harness fans and nothing else which is why I will continue to be tough on those who seem to be here for other reasons. It does however make you wonder when you are averaging a ban a day

[Messenger]

The Spam-O-Matic Statistics on the forum home page
states that 3 spammers have been permanently banned
Actually I have permanently banned a hundred
Please be understanding if on the odd occasion you see spam before we get to it

[Messenger]

We only have 3,154 members and not all of those would be legit (the names of some are a real give away)
And once again we are going through a period of many new members signing up but we are probably banning 9/10 of these before they spread their spam

To get an idea how big a problem spammers are you might notice in the Spam-O-Matic Statistics (below who is signed in)
That 431,875 Spammers have been denied registration

[Messenger]

I am banning someone on an hourly basis lately
It has only been a couple of months since the above post and yet the number of spammers that have not even got through
is now 498,472. That means about 67,000 have been denied registration in a little over 10 weeks
That is about 1,000 a day
The internet is a sick place

[Messenger]

The number denied registration is now over 700,000 = an extra 200,000 in the last year and a bit

I noticed we had a record 7,701 users online 5 days ago = Monday ???!!!!!!
Probably 1 member and 7,700 guests - doing what?

It would nice to have some legitimate activity - I read a forum related to another hobby of mine - gee it is fun to log on and every day you find a couple of dozen new things to read