Post by Traveller on Mar 23, 2006 3:17:13 GMT -5
I seriously hate to do this. I like the idea of having a place on the board where people can post without registering, first. Having some place like this encourages lurkers to get a little more spontaneous, I think.
The problem is spammers. Guessing where we're getting them from isn't difficult. One of our users (Dustbuddy) was being smeared on ePlaya through the use of a wrongful sockpuppet accusation. Our man asked the moderators to "vouch for the mismatch between IP addresses", proof positive of innocence when the IPs correspond to ISPs in different parts of the country, or at least darned close. The moderators refused, so the smearee set up a Usenet post to establish his IP in a public place.
There are very good reasons why somebody should not want to do that. Spambots harvest urls and e-mail addresses on Usenet. Shortly after that post, ePlaya started getting hit hard. One can't fault Dustbuddy for this. He had warned one of the moderators (Spectabilis) about what the consequences would be, if he took care of the problem himself, and practically begged Spec to not make him take that step. His reasonable request was ignored, a flood of spambots came in, and now we get to deal with some of the spillover. Thank you, Spec. I hope some day, in some small way, we can pay you back.
I had already made a small effort to talk up this forum on ePlaya, not knowing what was coming next. Links from ePlaya to this board provided a route for spambots to follow. When the number of spambots wandering ePlaya spiked, so did the probability that a few of them would find their way to our obscure little board. The same is bound to be true of a number of other forums off in the burning boondocks, all of whom can thank Spectabilis for this hassle.
All that I can do is wait for the spambot traffic on ePlaya to drop and my own posts to get old and drop out of sight. When the coast is clear in a few months,I'll try opening this board to general use. Your posts are still as welcome on TTBM as they've ever been, so please don't think you're being cold-shouldered. I'm just trying to get a problem under control.
The problem is spammers. Guessing where we're getting them from isn't difficult. One of our users (Dustbuddy) was being smeared on ePlaya through the use of a wrongful sockpuppet accusation. Our man asked the moderators to "vouch for the mismatch between IP addresses", proof positive of innocence when the IPs correspond to ISPs in different parts of the country, or at least darned close. The moderators refused, so the smearee set up a Usenet post to establish his IP in a public place.
There are very good reasons why somebody should not want to do that. Spambots harvest urls and e-mail addresses on Usenet. Shortly after that post, ePlaya started getting hit hard. One can't fault Dustbuddy for this. He had warned one of the moderators (Spectabilis) about what the consequences would be, if he took care of the problem himself, and practically begged Spec to not make him take that step. His reasonable request was ignored, a flood of spambots came in, and now we get to deal with some of the spillover. Thank you, Spec. I hope some day, in some small way, we can pay you back.
I had already made a small effort to talk up this forum on ePlaya, not knowing what was coming next. Links from ePlaya to this board provided a route for spambots to follow. When the number of spambots wandering ePlaya spiked, so did the probability that a few of them would find their way to our obscure little board. The same is bound to be true of a number of other forums off in the burning boondocks, all of whom can thank Spectabilis for this hassle.
All that I can do is wait for the spambot traffic on ePlaya to drop and my own posts to get old and drop out of sight. When the coast is clear in a few months,I'll try opening this board to general use. Your posts are still as welcome on TTBM as they've ever been, so please don't think you're being cold-shouldered. I'm just trying to get a problem under control.
