New member accounts

Illusion

I was just looking at the forum logs and found that over the last year, there have been hundreds of new members every month, whereas before August 2007 there were only a few each month.

I suspect automated robots are creating new accounts but not actually finalising due to the confirm login by e-mail check which the forum does.

Anyone with experience of this and how to stop this happening?

Fidjit

Or people who sign up and never want to return. Or has that been realised? $:-\$

HStorm

It's clear from most of the names on the new accounts that the overwhelming majority of them are set up by bots advertising sites with XXX material. The addresses of most forums sooner or later get targeted by spammers in the same way as e-mail addresses.

My recommendation is that you delete all accounts over a week old that have zero posts. It's also possible on most forums to add a validation mechanism i.e. an account isn't fully set up until the user answers a validation e-mail.

Fidjit

One with an expiry date you mean? Good plan, but is knightmare.com fitted with that kind of software?

HStorm

Shrugs Haven't a clue.

Drassil

I was just looking at the forum logs and found that over the last year, there have been hundreds of new members every month, whereas before August 2007 there were only a few each month.

I suspect automated robots are creating new accounts

I mentioned this to you in a message several months ago (let me know if you'd like me to re-send it). It's a problem that's been bothering me for a while: as long as these fake accounts continue to flood in and sit on the forum, we'll never know when it's acquired the milestone of 1000 true members.

Just before the trouble with spam accounts started last year, the end of the forum's URL switched from /forum to /forum2 for a time. For some reason, this meant that forum threads began appearing in Google searches, which has never been the case during the /forum eras. This may have constituted a 'security breach' that led to spambots/spiders picking up on the forum.

Many of the forum's non-posters are clearly genuine Knightmare fans, e.g. Aesandre, dungeon master, goblinhorn, Gumboil, Malice, Picklelover, Smirky and warningteam. Many of the forum's non-posters clearly are not: if PORNOHILTON and PORNOHILTONS are two bona fide individual Knightmare fans, then Huxley Pig just went past the window in an XL aeroplane. Email addresses and registration dates, as well as usernames, are a clue to whether or not an account is genuine.

Manual deletion seems the only sure solution to me, and though it's a hefty task, it can be shared out/delegated - provided that you're comfortable giving Moderators the power to delete accounts. Moderators Kieran and Malefact, your main deputies, could divide up the A-Z of current members between them and remove any accounts which are without doubt from spambots; and once that's done, they could each clear out any new spam accounts on alternate months (or be granted deletion powers every 6 months or so for a week, allowing them to give the members list periodic clean-ups without being permanently all-powerful ). The rest of us could help by listing any bogus accounts we spot, in this thread.

Admittedly that would be cure rather than prevention. There may be information on prevention here - this thread, for example, seems to be along the right lines.

Fidjit

...we'll never know when it's acquired the milestone of 1000 true members.

And the quietness of the board as of now it making it VERY difficult to find any true members. Some members make a thread in the Knewbie Welcome section, make up to 5-10 posts and never return or reappear after a few months.

I remember MSN doing a total destruction of E-Mail accounts unless you forward a reply to any other member. Whether its possible to do something like that on here is entirely beyond me. But if that ever came to plan I'd hate to look at the Total Members total crash down to an alarming proportion!

I suppose the members were posting a lot when Knightmare was on Challenge because they'd log on after the show had finished for the day/evening/weekend whatever. Nowadays Knightmare on TV is either rare or non-existant so therefore viewers won't tend to visit the Knightmare.com or forum sites.

Its a shame to see the forum floating about with nobody to visit it. The last person as of now, made a post on the 2nd October and its now the 5th. But I changed that

Pooka

I remember MSN doing a total destruction of E-Mail accounts unless you forward a reply to any other member.

Wasn't that a hoax?

Fidjit

Could well have been I never did forward a message and yet my original account is still intact

Illusion

Thanks for the advice Drassil. Will try and address this.

Helvellyn

Judging by the contents of this thread, I may as well say that I didn't vanish after a welcome post and one or two more, but I confess to not looking here all that often

Fidjit

We understand dude So what if we sent an E-Mail to every member asking if they'd like to keep their account? They should give their Forum Name and send it back to admin. The rest who don't reply after a few months get their account vapourised... If they're not checking Km.com Forum they'd be surely looking at their E-Mail more often