Tom V
November 14th, 2009, 11:18 AM
It seems that many of the outright spam and nonsense posts have been eliminated. I am sure that is because of the new system for registration. New members have to go through some sort of approval process - which I have no information on. I don't have the authority to approve new members - but I can ban them (YEAH!)
At the very bottom of the main forum page, you can find a link to see who is online and where they're browsing. As a super-moderator, I can see that it is usual to have 30% of the unregistered guests being blocked as they try to post, start threads, and create events, etc. They are blocked and meet with a permission denied message.
I have been banning users that have a low or zero post count, with oddities such as saying they reside in "uk" but have an IP address in India or China and their time zone set to the middle of the Pacific. Usually their bio says "Man" or "1". I copy their IP Address and do a search on them. Usually, they turn up listed in anti-spam sites, and I found a website that shows were the IP address is physically located (supposedly). I searched my own IP, and a few other trusted members' IP addresses, and as expected, they did not show up in anti-spam lists, and the locations made sense for the members' locations.
A lot of these banned users still lurk in the forums, reading ancient threads or trying to post. Some members write some very weird posts, and it is hard to tell if they are just bad at writing in English (it happens), or if it is some sort of content spammer software automatically generating somewhat topical gibberish. I am suspect of a few members like this. I am afraid that some day, our suspect member will have 50 odd posts all over this forum, then change their signature with some outright spam or URL links. I think the goal of some spammers is to see how many links they can have on pages all over the internet. Somehow, this works to their advantage, but it certainly doesn't help us.
I noticed a lot of banned users or unregistered guests viewing threads about big zoom lenses like 120-600 monsters. It seems they stay on those pages for hours or days. Weird.
It seems there is almost ALWAYs a Google Spider in here reading. I even found it reading a page that listed all the members' birthdays for a particular day in the year 2011. I copied a unique line off that page, and put it in a Google search, and our Forum page came up instantly. It's almost creepy. You should know that everything you write will be Google-spidered into some database. I've also seen "Ask Jeeves" spiders and bots grinding through our pages.
At the very bottom of the main forum page, you can find a link to see who is online and where they're browsing. As a super-moderator, I can see that it is usual to have 30% of the unregistered guests being blocked as they try to post, start threads, and create events, etc. They are blocked and meet with a permission denied message.
I have been banning users that have a low or zero post count, with oddities such as saying they reside in "uk" but have an IP address in India or China and their time zone set to the middle of the Pacific. Usually their bio says "Man" or "1". I copy their IP Address and do a search on them. Usually, they turn up listed in anti-spam sites, and I found a website that shows were the IP address is physically located (supposedly). I searched my own IP, and a few other trusted members' IP addresses, and as expected, they did not show up in anti-spam lists, and the locations made sense for the members' locations.
A lot of these banned users still lurk in the forums, reading ancient threads or trying to post. Some members write some very weird posts, and it is hard to tell if they are just bad at writing in English (it happens), or if it is some sort of content spammer software automatically generating somewhat topical gibberish. I am suspect of a few members like this. I am afraid that some day, our suspect member will have 50 odd posts all over this forum, then change their signature with some outright spam or URL links. I think the goal of some spammers is to see how many links they can have on pages all over the internet. Somehow, this works to their advantage, but it certainly doesn't help us.
I noticed a lot of banned users or unregistered guests viewing threads about big zoom lenses like 120-600 monsters. It seems they stay on those pages for hours or days. Weird.
It seems there is almost ALWAYs a Google Spider in here reading. I even found it reading a page that listed all the members' birthdays for a particular day in the year 2011. I copied a unique line off that page, and put it in a Google search, and our Forum page came up instantly. It's almost creepy. You should know that everything you write will be Google-spidered into some database. I've also seen "Ask Jeeves" spiders and bots grinding through our pages.