Hello everybody,

In the last couple of weeks, we've become aware of a significant spam account problem on silverstripe.org.
We've had three times the amount of registrations that we had in the first four years of the website.
I would really like to say this is a side effect of us taking over the CMS world, but it looks more like spam.

In order to counter-act spam by existing accounts, we've had to resort to quite drastic measures,
and suspend about half of the registered accounts indefinetly. This was performed by a few
criteria, most importantly not a single post on the forum - so no active members should be impacted by these measures.

The remaining accounts might either be "lurkers", or spam - we've tried to be smart on other criteria,
but can't exclude the possibility of "false posities" (suspended real accounts). If your account is suspended,
you'll see a red warning message when visiting the forum or your profile. Please contact support at silverstripe dot com
to reactivate your account, with a line or two to prove that you're ... human! :)

Sorry for the inconvenience!
Ingo

Hi Ingo,

I still see a lot of "new members" in the forum with nicknames like:howxw8xtoconcka. In the beginning most were from "Afghanistan" (= the first country in the drop-down list! - another burden on the shoulders of the poor Afghan people!!); now they come from other countries too. I don't believe the're "real people".
Wouldn't it be better to create a more strict procedure for new members? For instance: ask new members to drop a few lines in a special "introduce yourself" forum, and if they don't, delete their account in let's say two hours or so?

Just a thought...

Ko.

We're actually planning something similar to that, but a bit more automated based on stopforumspam.com data. Asking for a brief introduction means we need to manually vet applications (as spam bots will just automatically fill out most fields) - which is precisely what we want to avoid ;)

I didn't know this

Is there a forum account activation method for new login?

I've noticed that many account simply sign up with a link to thier website and contribute nothing. They surely do not need an account and are only doing so to get a link on their profile (whatever that is worth) - I hope that planned measures will reduce this.

Also I see some new accounts post nothing but useless replies, like 'I totally agree with anything you say' or 'I like your answer' and other nonsense...

This way old posts move to the front without any reason whatsoever. Would it be ok to just delete these posts?

Also what about footers? Someone just editted their posts, not to thank anyone or provide more information, to link three times each post to their business website. It is frustrating to have no contribution, but an obviously "linking" stragaery.