I got rid of it beause I thought i was going to have a huge increase in demand of time at work, home, and school - but that hasn’t happened yet, and won’t for a few more months. So I can still hang around this site for the time being.
Anyway,
while I’m still here and if you need something modded just send something to this account or the vive la insurrection account.
of course, I’ll now have to figure out what to do with two accounts. I don’t have an anwser for that yet
Yeah I kept waiting for my work load to pile up and to see when I could get accepted in a cetain school program, so I created the vive account to pass time. I can still spend time thinking about social science, which is good.
Anyway,
any advice or things that you think i needto be doing as a mod - or if you think I’m doing something wrong just post it here. I don’t really plan on being too proactive with anything other than spambots.
If it wasn’t always like this, it’s probably just because there are less mods active than before. I really think the whole “new forum” thing shook this forum a bit too hard.
Because it has no protection against bot account creation. The site gets picked up by a footprint so spammers know there is a forum at mises.org and bam, you’re on a list somewhere. Then a trainable bot figures out how to create and verify an account, which is really easy when you don’t modify the behavior of the template from the stock behavior. Even this doesn’t help sometimes because if your site is valuable enough spammers create and maintain human-created login procedures to keep getting in (the good news is that the vast majority of forums aren’t worth the effort).
IP blocks don’t help, it’s all done through proxies. Captcha may help, depending whose list you got on. Serious spammers tie their apps into DeatchByCaptcha which has real humans solving the captchas, but most spammers aren’t serious. The best part is the more “clean” your site is the more valuable you are to the serious spammers that you really can’t do anything about.
The best thing you can do is have a registration page with a random thing to do to verify that that the registrant is human. The randomness is the important part. One time it could be a math question, the next time it could be a “type the color shown”, the third time it could be “type the full name of the institute”, etc. If you do that, you’re instantly unappealing to all spammers.
Banning/deleting users won’t “end the assault”. If you notice, each spam account only gets off a post or two. On rare occasions one might go rapid fire and get off five new OPs…but these are all new accounts.
As cporter pointed just a few posts ago, the issue is basically the lack of tools in the forum structure. Account creation is free, and the only verification step is receiving an email.
There’s really nothing that can be done to prevent it until we switch to another forum or new tools are added to this one. Or just disable new account creation entirely. But I doubt we want to do that.
One of these spammers actually had something like 30 posts. But you are right, the problem in general will not be solved until we go to another forum or switch software or something.
Captcha is damn near useless at stopping spam. People will often see a reprieve in the short term if they make their way onto a captcha-free auto-approve list that circulates (those people aren’t expecting captchas when they run their software, so they often don’t check for it on a case by case basis). However, it’s only a matter of time before you end up on another list of captchad-but-undefended sites.
If you want pre-built services, use an uncommon service like Ubokia or just have an image that includes some text and some quoted text and instructions for the user to input the quoted text to authenticate. Bonus points if it rotates off the Mises daily quote. =P
What you definitely never want to do is what everyone else is doing, because that’s the next thing the Russians are writing software to bypass.