The Enid Blyton Society

Over the past week or two we have regretfully had a lot of problems with spammers, some of whom even posted in threads. Keith went into Dame Slap mode yesterday and I think he has now sorted the problem.

In future any new members will have to have their registration activated before they can post. Furthermore until they have been activated they will no longer show up on the Memberlist, so it will not be possible to see their sometimes offensive websites.

The latest person to attempt to register will still be visible as the newest registered user until I zap them, but none of the others will show up at all. At present although we appear to have 504 members the last four have not been activated and by the time you read this I may well have removed them.

I hope this process will not deter genuine enthusiasts who will be activated as quickly as possible.

Hopefully there won't be any more spammers now. It's such an annoying thing, and I hope the process won't stop members from registering. It shouldn't, I'm sure Blytonites won't delay in registering!!

Just saw you remove the four users, by the way.

It's a big problem on all forums these days unfortuantely . I am removing up to a dozen a day on EF. Admin verification is a good way to stop them, as is banning each IP address and email address as they register .. that prevents others registering from the same place.

The latest person to attempt to register will still be visible as the newest registered user until I zap them

Not any more! Consider them severely slapped. Now only the most recent activated (ie approved) member shows up.

Moose, I find that professional spammers deliberately use dynamically-assigned (ie, random!) IP addresses for the simple reason that people will try to ban them individually. It's a lost cause. Same with the email addresses -- they're random. There's no harm in blocking them except for the waste of time!

The standard phpbb forum system has a few holes, in that newly registered members automatically show up in both the memberlist and at the bottom of the index page as "newest user" -- meaning anyone can click through to their profiles and see their web address. But I don't think they're even bothered whether you click through or not -- they're looking for the link itself, so search engines will count it as a one-way link to their site, thus increasing their ranking, etc.

I've now manually changed some code so that non-active members don't show up on the memberlist or at the foot of the forums index. And now the moderators have to approve registrations manually too, so in theory there's no way any spammers can post any junk or display their links in the profiles.

Fingers crossed.......

Well done, Keith. Go to the village shop, draw up a chair, and order a plate of macaroons and a ginger beer.

We are all indebted to your tireless efforts in making this site Blyton-friendly again.

To the spammers: "Clear-Orf!"

Keith, yeah I have that problem with PhPbb .. even when I am manually registering accounts you can still see the latest registered person and some of them choose very offensive names . I've found that a lot of them DO use the same email domains though, so if you ban one it has a temporary effect. Only lasts a few days though and then they start coming from somewhere else

[Nigel:] Well done, Keith. Go to the village shop, draw up a chair, and order a plate of macaroons and a ginger beer.

Or even a spam sandwich!

Spam is jolly nice you know .. especially with a fried eggs and some nice greasy chips. They should have called the internet stuff something else .. haggis perhaps?

Interesting point about spam! Why IS internet garbage called that? I wonder if it came from Monty Python's Spam sketch:

"Breakfast? I recommend the spam, spam, spam, spam, spam, spam, beans, eggs, and spam."

"But I don't LIKE spam! Is there anything on the menu without spam in it?"

"Well, spam, spam, spam, sausage, eggs and spam doesn't have much spam..."

I guess it's simply because it's always been around, everyone's heard of it, and everyone gets it at some time or another. And it passes through quite easily.

Stupid Pointless Annoying Messages.

Spot on, Jools!

High "Google Page Rank" means high spam-rate.
For this matter a great honour but a lot of work .
Here at this place a big thank you to all admins and responsible people of the EBS-sites.You make me

Senseless People Annoying Millions

Another spot-on point!

It is indeed named after the Python sketch