Suggestion: change user verification

Shabbaman

Shabbaman

insert avatar here
I've got a suggestion to the forum admins: do the user verification of new members manually. There aren't that many "real" new members, and a lot of spambots. If you do the verification manually, we'd get rid of all the spam and the spambots. And then Ransac will have so much free time that he could start playing magic again!

The major downside is that the verification has to be done by the admin, in the admin control panel. I'm not sure if it's possible to delegate this, so the admin should be visiting the site on a regular basis. I'm not sure that is currently the case.
 
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Spiderman

Administrator
Staff member
Yeah, I think we're gonna go that way, especially with the upgrade to v3.7. It seems there are spammers who still click on those activation email messages (although there's lots who don't - 2500+ at last count) and there's several of us on covering the hours of the day, so it shouldn't be too bad.

Although judging from the number of new registrations each day, it's like 45-60.
 
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Spiderman

Administrator
Staff member
Well, I turned it on yesterday and it looks like it stopped the spam. Now to see how many are in there :)
 
Mooseman

Mooseman

Isengar Tussle
Seems like the spam messages are mostly gone, but there are still a lot of new users......
Do you need any help with the verification?
 
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Spiderman

Administrator
Staff member
Naw, there were only 22 in there and looked like all spam users. At least, no decently named names or anything.

So this new version has a "Delete All" button for that which I used to wipe it out :)

There's always going to be new users, it's just the different levels of approval they have to go through. First there's the email verification, so they have to actually go to the email and click it which weeds out a bunch. Then they have to wait for a mod's approval, which we're probably not gonna give anyway :)
 
Shabbaman

Shabbaman

insert avatar here
Brilliant, isn't it? It should save you a lot of work. Most of the time you can see by the name or email if it's a bot (not that many nicaraguans with a russian email). Otherwise you'd have to figure it out based on their profile. You could put a message regarding the user verification in the application email, encouraging new members to fill some fields in their profile.
 
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Spiderman

Administrator
Staff member
Shabbaman: Well, lately the spam seems to come from gmail.com, so it's a valid email address. The others are a bit more uncommon but still reasonable (e-mail.com or something). And most of the fields are filled out in the profile - I think they just took the form and pre-filled it in :)
 
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