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There should be a new account / intro section on the forum. this will make it so that the only thing a new user can post to is that single forum. It will at least contain the spam in there and if the new user is legit they can be approved for regular forum posting and given higher access privs. MyBB has a lot of features and plugins that can prevent a lot of this and make it a lot easier to manage.
Increasing the registrations per IP doesnt sound like a good idea. Per IP should mean each individual computer. And even if they are in Hawaii's blocks does not mean they are not zombie machines infected with virus doing the bidding of a spam bot network. Virus have moved away from being destructive to being used as tools to make money.
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There is also the nuclear option- A new user has to email the administrator and request access. The administrator emails back and asks what user name they want and then the account is setup manually. It does cut down on new user registrations but spam bots don't bother. Punaweb is probably low-traffic enough that it wouldn't be too large of a burden. An account is only necessary to post or contact other users. Fortunately PW has been hit only with SEO bots. If the spam bots arrive they might start sending spam to individual users.
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07-12-2020, 10:10 PM
(This post was last modified: 07-12-2020, 10:12 PM by Rob Tucker.)
As Punaweb reopens I have tried to make getting back on board easy....and not requiring my approval for each returnee.
That may change soon. As for our current crop of spammers two things are going on...
1. I am trying to master the mechanism for "purging" spammers which is a one click method for deleting their posts and permanently banning them. I have successfully purged several spamers this way. One click and gone. The current one, Aldenwax, for some reason the purge link does not show up when I look at his posts or user details. I'll get him.
2. I am getting Punaweb registered and linked to an anti forum spam organization. When this take place there should be automatic banning of entities registered as spammers elsewhere.
For now be patient. We will get this under control. I wish I could understand the overall motive in dumping spam messages in a forum. Just how productive can that be?
Assume the best and ask questions.
Punaweb moderator
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That looks like a real PITA there. Glad I used an obscure domain prefix. Hell, our site doesn't even show up in search engine results when the URL is searched. No web crawler bots even look at our site.
I wonder, do you think that perhaps establishing a new domain prefix and then pointing your original domain to the new secure and obscure domain prefix might help? There'd be no reason to continue spamming your new domain... ?
I sent you a PM on here, Rob. It has our site domain in it and that domain we use is an SSL mandatory domain.
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Wao nahele kane,
Survivor and Veteran of the Punaweb Wars
Wao nahele kane,
I salute you, we salute you... we few, we happy few, we band of brothers.
"I'm at that stage in life where I stay out of discussions. Even if you say 1+1=5, you're right - have fun." - Keanu Reeves
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HOTPE,
A classified matter, indeed.
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"For now be patient. We will get this under control. I wish I could understand the overall motive in dumping spam messages in a forum. Just how productive can that be?"
The productivity doesn't need to be measured in a tangible sense, the entire process is performed by automated scripts ("bots") from beginning to end and requires no human intervention after the script is written. You're not playing whack-a-mole with real people and likely the people who own the machines that are running the code have no idea their machines are infected.
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Okay, this is the html code I'm adding to our website... <meta name="robots" content="noindex">
We have only one hit from bing and it's just the index page, no content beyond that has yet been indexed.
If these spammers are an issue and they're doing for the reason of establishing web presence for clients ranking results, it would be no longer a benefit for them to use Punaweb if there's a noidex script under the header.
The tradeoff is that members new comments in punaweb will no longer appear in search engine results.
For our subdivisions website, that's a plus for the users privacy.
Here's a link to a page that explains this aspect of removing url info from web crawlers, in particular, Bing.
https://www.bing.com/webmaster/help/how-...x-37c07477
