Should we give potential spammers a chance?
- Thread starter Jason76
- Start date
It's not reliable because your member could possibly be using a shared IP address provided to them from a VPN service (or something like that). You should wait until the member actually does something wrong instead of pre judging them based on their IP address.
I think you always should put them on mod queue first, to see what they post and what things they put on their post. It isn't easy, to target someone as a spammer when they first join. I really don't think the IP address is the bit that makes them spammer, if you're a bit worried though, just put them on mod queue and you will see what they are really like. So yes, they should always be allowed in. It's like being innocent until proven guilty.
I think we all agree! I haven't even heard of SFS till now.
StopForumSpam is usually right, but like other sites of its type has false positives. There's also the issue of shared/dynamic IP like Aries mentioned above. I wouldn't outright ban someone upon registration if they were a spam match, I would wait to see if they were actually a spammer or not. A common complaint I've seen on the SFS forum is that they were vindictively added to the database, since SFS allows website owners to submit people- the owners could be adding someone for their own personal reasons.
Although between the other spam measures my forum has (MyBB inbuilt spam features,ReCaptcha,Project Honeypot, etc)not a lot of spammers get through, human or otherwise.
Although between the other spam measures my forum has (MyBB inbuilt spam features,ReCaptcha,Project Honeypot, etc)not a lot of spammers get through, human or otherwise.
Shannon Apple
Resident
Stop forum spam is almost always right. Our forum has warned about people joining with common first names, but I've let those in because they weren't spammers. You can check the email yourself and run the IP address and see if it's been blacklisted. I do that. 9 times out of 10, the email and IP has a whole slew of blacklist red marks and it's in Ukraine, China or Russia. XD
Since shared IP addresses exist, how do you know for sure the incidents you've seen in your report were actually committed by the same person? It could have been someone else using that same IP address. You never know. Best to wait until the member actually does something wrong on your forum to know for sure.
Shannon Apple
Resident
Meh, I've been involved the running of websites for a very long time, and it was almost never the case that a blocked account turned out to be a real person. Our A4 site had 120,000 members. At one point in time, we were being plagued by up to 200 bots a day posting multiple content. There comes a time where you're like "Nope, don't wanna deal with that." I can pretty much tell a spam account now just by looking at the email. Haha! We enabled spam-o-matic since we were running vBulletin at the time. This blocked 95% of bots, but they were still bombarding the gates. Within a short space of time, the stats said "Spam-o-matic has blocked 200,000 spammers from registering." Within a reasonably short space of time, a few months maybe, that number went up to 800,000. LOL! That's like 6 or 7 times the number of registered accounts. Imagine! In order to relieve stress on the server, over a period of time we had systematically blocked several countries that were responsible for the bulk of the spammers. Mainly Asian countries, and definitely China. So, we might have lost out on one or two potential members, but that's a very small price to pay.
And there is why I don't really care if they are shared IP. ^^. I know it's tough and I know Sakuga City is a dot in comparison, but there are several points of contact, and we have active social media pages, including a Facebook group, if people want to rage at us for being blocked. ^^
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