Free-Forums.org Support

BCB · Joined: 09 Mar 2007 Posts: 18

Our forum is not accepting anymore members for now but people still register all the time, is there a way of stopping registrations?cheers

support · Site Admin Joined: 25 Apr 2005 Posts: 374 Location: Inside

If you do not want new members you can write : we do not accept new members and you can Go to Administration Panel->Configuration ->Enable account activation and set Admin . Save and all new member will can use their accounts until an admin will not activate that accounts . So it is the same thing like stop registrations, nobody will post without your acces
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BCB · Joined: 09 Mar 2007 Posts: 18

BanthaTracks · Joined: 06 Sep 2006 Posts: 9

Yes, I'm curious about this as well. I have the image verification set to yes for new requested accounts. I guess there are people who are entering in the spam, but I suspect its still a bot given the amount of accounts each day that are bogus. Plus, when they don't change the language, its pretty obvious.

Do you suspect these are bots or people entering in all these bogus accounts?

support · Site Admin Joined: 25 Apr 2005 Posts: 374 Location: Inside

BCB - this is all you can do. Maybe set an autoresponder of your e-mail account to tell then that account will not be activated.

BanthaTracks -> any verification can be bypassed by bots, it is imposible to stop them. And if it is not passed human can pass and create account and then -> give to bots to use for spam. I do not think that it is a good solution for that Sad

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BanthaTracks · Joined: 06 Sep 2006 Posts: 9

I'm getting upwards of 10 account registrations a day that are spam.

As an Admin, I get an email that has the link to approve the account. How about adding a link that will remove the account as well? Just going by the name on the request, I could determine well over 75% that are bogus. In the email it would help to recieve a table of the values they entered for their account as well, so that would give me even more detail whether or not the account is bogus.

I do this sort of thing on tools I develop. So depending on how easily you guys can modify the code, it sure would save me a good deal of time weeding out these spam bots

support · Site Admin Joined: 25 Apr 2005 Posts: 374 Location: Inside

i know, Problem it is time Sad

....i have too less time than usual and many hack attack that must be solved fast . What you say will not solve the problem. It is better to let them have unactivated accounts because they will not register with the same name again . If you delete account, they will register again and again with the same name (they are bots not humans in general), it is posible to activate themself the accounts, they can bypass this security. Where it is the problem if you let them with unactivated accounts ? . Here on support forum i think more than 10- 15.000 are bots, but have no problems with that until now
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BCB · Joined: 09 Mar 2007 Posts: 18

It's disappointing that there is not a function whereas registrations are stopped without having to delete accounts constantly, i get anything from 10 to 50 new new accounts a day, a lot of spam but just normal registrations as well but out forum has enough members and it is closed membership for the foreseeable future.

Thanks for your help anyway support.

BanthaTracks · Joined: 06 Sep 2006 Posts: 9

The problem with leaving the accounts is that even unactivated accounts show up on the members list. And being on the member list page, the account still can advertise a webpage. And given some of these webpages ads are of the undesirable, I don't want my forum providing free advertisement for them.

Having the member page visible and showing unactivated accounts gives them a free way to advertise. They don't care if the account is activated or not. They don't need it to spam.

Having the email with a "delete" option would be so useful and time saving. It wont solve it, but it sure would help us Admins out and should be a pretty easy mod.

BanthaTracks · Joined: 06 Sep 2006 Posts: 9

Here is an example of the issue I'm discussing. Look at the current list of members we have; have to look at the end of the list of course for the latest members.

http://tk.free-forums.org/memberlist.php?mode=joined&order=ASC&start=50

As you can see on the last ones, which are all bogus, there is a www link to either a drug selling page and/or porn page. The amount of registrations that are bogus has really jumped up in the last month. And I can't clean them out every day. I'll probably clear some tonight so if you don't read this post before then and try the link, you may or may not see the extent of the problem.

So I'll ask again, there is no hope of modifying the code to send out a link to the Admins where they can also delete the account in addition to approving it?

This would be such a huge feature for us Admins. Perhaps the other Admins can chime in here.

BanthaTracks · Joined: 06 Sep 2006 Posts: 9

Is this mod a possibility to be incorporated here?

http://www.phpbb.com/community/viewtopic.php?t=117359

It appears to being doing what I had discussed before, i.e. providing an easy interface to make updates to a number of users/members at once.

support · Site Admin Joined: 25 Apr 2005 Posts: 374 Location: Inside

No, can not be integrated so easy because must be edited all templates for that to work on every forum configuration and are more than 300 files. +all language files.

It is very hard to work with many skins(templates) and to modify something.

I made a spam protection modification on source code that will diminuate spam on forums very very much i think. Maybe over 80%-90% of spammers can not post now on forums because of what i made. One time was bypaseed, i do not know how, but now it is ok i think.

So you should not worry so much about the registered users anymore. I will try to solve this problem too if i will find a good and easy solution to do it.
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BanthaTracks · Joined: 06 Sep 2006 Posts: 9

Ok.

I've created my own user management pages to view the last registrants and delete a range or single registrants quickly, without having to cut and paste the names of the registrants, manually deleting them one at a time.

I've done this with ColdFusion and I data mine the admin pages essentially for my user info which I display back and then can enter their user numbers to delete the spam accounts with a few key strokes. This avoids having to install anything on the host side and negates the headaches of worrying about what skin template is being used.

I'm in the processing of making it more generalized so if others are interested let me know. I'm trying to gauge the interest because right now I can quickly cull my user accounts but I would like to make it a generic tool if there is interest.

support · Site Admin Joined: 25 Apr 2005 Posts: 374 Location: Inside

I have created an user list with multiple features !
Now it is working for all skins !

I hope this is useful ! I invite you all to test it !
Thank you for your patience !

If somebody find any bugs or not working on a skin please tell me !
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BanthaTracks · Joined: 06 Sep 2006 Posts: 9

Yep that works for me. Thanks!!!

Is that part of the mods, I post the link to previously?