There's no real easy way that I have found to prevent spammers from signing up, I use cloudflare and have all kinds of filters in place as well as security, there are even some countries I have completely blocked from accessing the site, but at the end of the day if you lock it down to much then the real folks who want to join end up not being able to. So the system is far from perfect, but at the moment it's manageable with a bit of help from you guys which I really appreciate. Your welcome to go looking through the member list for potential spam accounts if you want but its' very time consuming and I don't have the time to do that myself, plus sometimes I found that I can't quite tell if an account is spam or not, victor is a really popular name in various forms to use for some reason by the spammers but there are also a variety of others as well that are often used. Also they often have very suspicious email addresses like [email protected] with an crazy amount of periods etc. Some are pretty easy to spot and others are harder, there are currently 100 pages of inactive users meaning they have registered but not authenticated their account yet via email yet. I used to go through those one a time but it's super time consuming as I've mentioned. I can mass delete them but then you run the risk of accidentally deleting someone genuine. I also don't like to delete them as much because they can just sign back up with those same credentials, and it's an endless cycle, vs banning which kills that username and email etc forever.
Banning IP's is a dangerous business to get into because most people don't have static IP address's instead they are dynamic and change every so often, which means not only will it not really do much as they can simply change IP, it also means that later if that IP gets assigned to someone who is not a spammer they won't be able to use the site.
I'm super open to ideas and suggestions, I know there is a lot more that could be done on the site, unfortunately ideas that involve me making developmental changes to the site will be implemented very very slowly with my current life situation 3 kids and work etc. Anyhow I just wanted to at least reply here so you guys know where I'm at with things. I really appreciate everyone of you who contribute and participate in maintaining the site.
By all means if you want to look for spammers or get ahead of it in any way that is 100% fine with me, I wouldn't have given you permission to ban folks if I didn't trust you to use it.
Banning IP's is a dangerous business to get into because most people don't have static IP address's instead they are dynamic and change every so often, which means not only will it not really do much as they can simply change IP, it also means that later if that IP gets assigned to someone who is not a spammer they won't be able to use the site.
I'm super open to ideas and suggestions, I know there is a lot more that could be done on the site, unfortunately ideas that involve me making developmental changes to the site will be implemented very very slowly with my current life situation 3 kids and work etc. Anyhow I just wanted to at least reply here so you guys know where I'm at with things. I really appreciate everyone of you who contribute and participate in maintaining the site.
By all means if you want to look for spammers or get ahead of it in any way that is 100% fine with me, I wouldn't have given you permission to ban folks if I didn't trust you to use it.
