GMLscripts.com

xot

Administrator

Registered: 2007-08-18

Posts: 1,239

Spam and You

Sorry, GMLscripts.com lurkers. If you have registered but have never posted in the forums, your account is now a casualty of the War On Spam.

Beginning with the New Year, GMLscripts.com gained the dubious distinction of becoming a target for spammers. Over the ensuing weeks, fraudulent registrations increased to 50-60 per day. Manually clearing out forum spam became a tiresome daily challenge. Eventually, I opted for a more automated solution with Akismet and it's proved a valuable ally. It catches about 90% of posted spam. However, most of these spam accounts were sleepers, laying in wait to pounce.

Despite banning many spammers everyday, the number of silent spammer accounts rose to nearly 2000 and it was clear more needed to be done. After seeing it on the Bit Collective forums (makers of the indielicious Winnitron 1000), I decided to insert a simple challenge question into the registration process. For now, this seems to have completely halted spam registrants. I have a more sophisticated system in mind should the current challenge cease to be effective.

Unfortunately, that's where you come into the story. You see, there remained the matter of the hundreds and hundreds of sleeper accounts. After a few hours of chipping away at them, it became clear that more drastic measures were required. Any account that has never posted to the forums has now been deleted. This means several of you very helpful members who have submitted scripts but have never posted to the forums will have to register again. I apologize deeply for this, it should never happen again -- but if it does, you may be able to save yourself some future trouble just by posting a nice "hello" in the forums introductions topic.

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Abusing forum power since 1986.