News Item: Spam spam spam spam
(Category: News)
Posted by sleepy
Wednesday 14 March 2012 - 20:19:26
Everyone has been putting up with the ridiculous amount of spam on the site for far too long now, so I've taken some pretty serious steps toward dealing with that problem. First of all, I've gone through and banned several hundred spammers as well as deleting several thousand of their spam posts. Even with help from an automated tool to do this, my wrist is sore from the clicking.
I've also instituted a "new user" time period. When you sign up for a new account you will not be able to post links of any kind right away and the number of posts you can make will be limited. Even after you get past this new user phase you will only be able to post a maximum of 2 links per message. Period. Most of the real forum traffic here doesn't need links so this shouldn't pose a problem for anyone.
Additionally, I've added a new security plugin that scans for known bots, detects hacking attempts, and checks every site access against a list of "evil" IP addresses that are known for distributing spam and/or malware. This should effectively make the server a little more responsive since bandwidth won't be wasted on the hackers and spammers.
Hopefully none of these changes will affect your user experience in any way... but if you see anything strange happening, please let me know. On the good side of things, since this is a "real" solution (unlike my previous workaround of just disabling the comments system), so everything should be seamless and back to normal. The comments system has been re-enabled and all of that should be working well.
Anyway, I think that covers it. Hope everyone enjoys the new and improved rdocs!
This news item is from replacementdocs
( http://replacementdocs.com/news.php?extend.192 )
(Category: News)
Posted by sleepy
Wednesday 14 March 2012 - 20:19:26
Everyone has been putting up with the ridiculous amount of spam on the site for far too long now, so I've taken some pretty serious steps toward dealing with that problem. First of all, I've gone through and banned several hundred spammers as well as deleting several thousand of their spam posts. Even with help from an automated tool to do this, my wrist is sore from the clicking.
I've also instituted a "new user" time period. When you sign up for a new account you will not be able to post links of any kind right away and the number of posts you can make will be limited. Even after you get past this new user phase you will only be able to post a maximum of 2 links per message. Period. Most of the real forum traffic here doesn't need links so this shouldn't pose a problem for anyone.
Additionally, I've added a new security plugin that scans for known bots, detects hacking attempts, and checks every site access against a list of "evil" IP addresses that are known for distributing spam and/or malware. This should effectively make the server a little more responsive since bandwidth won't be wasted on the hackers and spammers.
Hopefully none of these changes will affect your user experience in any way... but if you see anything strange happening, please let me know. On the good side of things, since this is a "real" solution (unlike my previous workaround of just disabling the comments system), so everything should be seamless and back to normal. The comments system has been re-enabled and all of that should be working well.
Anyway, I think that covers it. Hope everyone enjoys the new and improved rdocs!
This news item is from replacementdocs
( http://replacementdocs.com/news.php?extend.192 )