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In an effort to combat spammers Puanweb is now trying out an "email authentication" feature.
In the past any person wishing to register just did so. We did apply a Captcha program to weed out spambots.... and that worked rather well.
Now it appears that there are keyboard farms in China with people physically registering on obscure sites such as this.
We will see how "email authentication" works. It may not reduce the time involved in managing.... may increase it. I don't know yet.
Assume the best and ask questions.
Punaweb moderator
Assume the best and ask questions.
Punaweb moderator
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Rob, I am sorry you are having to deal with this. I am not knowledgeable on why these people are doing this. What do they get out of this kind of nuisance activity?
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It is a bit if a mystery. Apparently they are paid a marginal sum by somebody to do this. When they do succeed in registering on a forum the posts themselves are barely intelligible and can't be credible to generate revenue for anyone.
It all seems like a huge waste of time.... or I am missing the point.
Assume the best and ask questions.
Punaweb moderator
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A hacker told me that Captcha is easily circumvented. Hopefully the new extra step will have the desired effect, if only to make them pick on easier targets.
I guess the theory is that if enough people see a link then someone will always click on it!
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Punaweb is fairly well placed in major search engines like Google and Bing. You will notice that the spam messages have URLs in them. The messages themselves are usually nothing more than gibberish but the URLs that are within the messages are scanned by the search engines as they spider Punweb. This will enhance the position of the same URLs with the various search engines. Having many different websites linking to your website will increase your position with the various engines.
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Chinese curse "May you live in interesting times".
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All of the above. Two problems:
1. Search engines don't bother to parse the text for "readability", otherwise the non-intelligible spam would be ignored.
2. Commercialization has turned the internet into a home shopping network, otherwise nobody would bother spiking their search results.
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Interesting reading:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forum_spam
If it gets too much Rob then I'm sure you can enlist some of the regulars to delete spammers for you.
I'm sure a suitable mechanism can be worked out if it comes to that.
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Yep, sometimes you have to enlist the help of others... Some people can't donate a lot of $ to the site but might be interested in helping in other ways.
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Give keys to inmates?
Pua`a
S. FL
Big Islander to be.
Pua`a
S. FL
Big Islander to be.
Posts: 1,051
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Joined: Apr 2006
My Heineken is squirting from each nostril all over my keyboard. Dude you owe me a new keyboard. Pretty dang funny!!!
___________________________
Chinese curse "May you live in interesting times".
