Backyard Aquaponics
A place to discuss aquaponics

Here is some useless trivia about spammers and this forum.

Since November 5th, 6 weeks ago (43 days), I have deleted the membership applications of 492 spammers, 11.44 per day. These are applications from porn sites, "cigarette companies", "car companies" and the like.

These applications have come from 277 different IP addresses, with 97 of those used on multiple occasions (312 multiple uses - 16 goes from one address)

Those with multiple "offences" have gone on to have their IP address blocked so they can't try again from that IP.

We have even blocked a couple of very obvious email addresses, from whence many spammers like to originate.

This job takes, on average, about 10 minutes each time I log on to the forum.

In the same time period, we have had 106 real people who are really interested in aquaponics join us here on this great forum

Thanks for the stats Jaymie and your good work.

And here I was thinking you were just lounging around your [s]pool[/s] tank sipping mango daquiris all day

Kudos. and thanks.

wow i had no idea there would be that many good work and thanks

You are THE NUMBER ONE 'Spam Assassin'
Well done, and keep up the good work.
Thanks so much for your (and others) efforts on this forum.
It really is, a gold mine of information.

Hi Jaymie,

Yes, thanks to all the moderators for maintaining a great forum! Muchly appreciated.



How do they get past the validation? (ie. enter the 5 letters/digits)

I assume the SPAM'ing is automated?

And thats since we started blocking IP addresses.. It was soooo much worse a couple of months back wasn't it Jaymie. I'd get home in the afternoon and find 50 emails, and 49 would be dodgy spammers trying to join the forum..

Just goes to show you all the voluntary behind the scenes work.

Thanks for your efforts J

good work! do you think they're real people doing the sign-ups or 'bots ? I found on another forum that changing the font of the CAPTCHA's to a certain ( can't remember which ) true-type font dropped the number of spammers joining to almost zero.

Yes, well done all of you...we may not state it all the time, but we all appreciate what you do and have done to make this forum what it is

...and just incase I have missed anyone - merry xmas to you all and hope the new year brings a lessening in the work load (down with spammers)

UT i tried to implement a near bot proof signup page, unfortunatly the amount of previous modifications to the board rendered it "nopt working" spew.

You gotta get your change managment processes down pat!

had been "professionally" modded b4 the modder cut and run

Thanks for the hard work, Jaymie!! I haven't seen one get past you in quite a while. (And there were a couple that gave me quite a start. )