Thread
Membership Purge
I haven't done one of these for a while, so just a quick note to say that I have just done a purge of all the inactive* accounts from the forums. I have left those under a week old to allow people who have just registered to become involved.
We do this occasionally as a spam prevention measure. We get a lot of members signing up for fake accounts and including their business website in their profile to improve their Google page ranking. This is obviously hard to detect, but since the majority of these members either don't post or post spam, doing an occasional clear out like this gets rid of those that don't post, while those that do post have their accounts deleted immediately.
If you had signed up at some point in the past, but haven't made any posts, then please feel free to sign up again. However, if you don't post anything then I can't guarantee how long your account will be around [
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Cheers,
~T
* Accounts that haven't made any posts since they registered.
We do this occasionally as a spam prevention measure. We get a lot of members signing up for fake accounts and including their business website in their profile to improve their Google page ranking. This is obviously hard to detect, but since the majority of these members either don't post or post spam, doing an occasional clear out like this gets rid of those that don't post, while those that do post have their accounts deleted immediately.
If you had signed up at some point in the past, but haven't made any posts, then please feel free to sign up again. However, if you don't post anything then I can't guarantee how long your account will be around [
)] ]'>Cheers,
~T
* Accounts that haven't made any posts since they registered.
Arent there like 999999 of them around?
What about if someone barely ever posts. Like me. Just reads?
As long as you have made at least one post, nothing will happen to your account. This is only to purge spam "sleeper" accounts – however, tracking each one down by hand would be rather time consuming. Deleting all accounts with zero posts that are over a week old can be done in a single SQL query [
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Discrimination, pure and simple!
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Wow, harsh. I sometimes post several times a day for days and then wont post for a month or two yet I have been on here since before the crash. Can't you look at number of posts as well?
That is one post ever [
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Don't purge me bro!
Since we've upgraded to phpBB 3, the number of spam account registrations has increased dramatically. This is due to the fact that the reCAPTCHA plug-in we used isn't compatible with phpBB3. Because of this I am going to be purging the member list fairly regularly to keep the spam accounts at bay. So this is just a friendly reminder to anyone who has signed up recently and hasn't posted yet – if you do not post at least once within a week of registering your account will probably be removed.
Is there another anti-spam service we could use, similar to reCAPTCHA?
I haven't seen any – at least none that have a plug-in for phpBB 3. I would guess a reCAPTCHA plug-in will be developed before too long, but until then I'll just keep purging the member list occasionally.
That sounds alright to me :b&w:
Is that the final solution?
Unfortunately not, because the pesky bots keeps signing up!
More of a temporary solution, like moving all spammers to Madagascar.
More of a temporary solution, like moving all spammers to Madagascar.
Not very funny, at all.
It's a joke, lighten up!
Avoiding premature death -- now !
!
Just wondering if you'd purged Trash80toG-4 for not having posted for . . . something like . . . ummmmm . . . maybe two years or so? :
jt
jt
Ummm... He only purged those who have made less than 1 post in their account's lifetime
Nope... I haven't purged it. The account would have been lost when the forum's hosting account went down in 2007 and we had to start again since we didn't have an up to date backup. I don't think you've been active since then, so the account would never have been recreated.
As one of the main culprits that nagged until we got phpBB3, i'm sorry that i have caused more manual work .
.Don't worry about it. I think we've got the spambot registration problem under control now anyway. I've added a couple of anti-spambot questions to the registration page, the answers to which are required to be correct before the registration is completed. Most spambot registrations post data to the server directly and expect phpBB to accept it. Since they never actually go load the registration page, they have no idea that those questions actually exist, so their registrations never go through. Seems to work quite nicely... [As one of the main culprits that nagged until we got phpBB3, i'm sorry that i have caused more manual work
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