Spam on this Forum

[Charles Daly]

Loyal members and guests of the forum,

We are being subjected to an unusually large number of Spammers this week. We are not the only firearms forum that has been hit. I have heard from two other popular forums that were also inundated with porn.

We are removing the threads, and banning the poster, as soon as we discover the offending posts. Unfortunately, we are not online all the time so we are vulnerable to something getting on the site and being there for a day or two, particularly if it happens over a weekend and neither I nor the Webmaster have logged on.

We need more Moderators to help us. If we can get 2 more Moderators then there will me a much greater chance that one of us is online or will be online shortly. Moderators can delete the offending thread and ban the user. If there is any question as to whether or not to ban, the Mod can ban a user for a temporary time limit. Later we can determine whether or not to make it a permanent ban.

I am sending PM's to the two candidates I would like to see as Mods and will post shortly on where we will go from here.

Sincerely,

[Charles Daly]

We will be testing new security additions to the forum this afternoon. The new security will require that a poster answer some questions before being able to register and/or post. We hope that it will not be too burdensome as we want users to post often.

Please bear with us during this testing phase.

Thank you for your patience and consideration.

Sincerely,

[Gramps]

Thanks Mike, when I saw that come up last night, my first reaction was "WTH". I in my limited knowledge, could not really find a moderator, so that is why I "PMed" you and then went to the "Contact Us" link and let them know so as to try to get it stoped asap.

Keep up the "EXCELLENT" work. ;)

[Charles Daly]

We added an additional layer of security that should stop the 'bots'. There was one spammer that got on this morning, so it's obvious we can't stop them all. However, we are adding several moderators that will give us more "eyes" on the forum, so the spammers that do get through will be caught much faster than before.

I will be announcing the new Mods in a separate thread/post.

[strycnine]

What security did you add? They were hitting my vBulletin forum pretty hard too. I finally against my better judgement started IP banning by country.

[melensdad]

What security did you add? They were hitting my vBulletin forum pretty hard too. I finally against my better judgement started IP banning by country.

We also use vBulletin and run an international Snowcat discussion forum. So despite the fact that I have members from Sweden to Iceland to Australia to Sri Lanka, I've also done a few IP bans by country. Mostly, however our team of moderators looks over all the new members, does IP traces, even does Google searches on the member names, plus we look for patterns. We get hit with a couple spams a day on a bad day but they are usually removed and banned very quickly.

[strycnine]

Thanks for the info.

One day I got hit with 17 bots/spammers. I almost couldn't keep up with them.