Comments on: Have you noticed all of your members?

By: Martin Reed - Blog Author

Martin Reed - Blog Author — Thu, 06 Sep 2007 12:55:09 +0000

Peter - There is a hack for phpBB which prevents people from being able to enter a homepage until they have been approved as members. Additionally, the humanizer hack should stop pretty much all spam memberships.

By: Peter

Peter — Thu, 06 Sep 2007 11:45:37 +0000

I use phpbb2, and yes you can hold all applications in a queue pending review, the problem is it doesn’t stop them entering their website address on our site, meaning antone on our site, guest or member can access the entered website, as I have said elsewhere after one link downloading a virus, I can’t take that chance on a international website.

I am trying out phpbb3 at the moment which seems to have more settings for this type of thing.

I I could get the forums to do it the way wordpress does it then all problems would be solved, in other words nothing shows until they have been approved

By: Martin Reed - Blog Author

Martin Reed - Blog Author — Thu, 06 Sep 2007 11:37:16 +0000

Peter – What forum software are you running? There must be a way of holding all new applications in a moderation queue until you manually review them. Your current process, though it seems effective, is extremely time consuming.

By: Peter

Peter — Sun, 02 Sep 2007 23:37:17 +0000

Well Martin, i have found that one in 15 is genuine, the rest are spam and with 3 forums it’s takes a while to get rid of them all (at least 10 a day), they add websites that on one occasion when I went to check it out downloaded some virus onto my computer, it was at that point I changed it, what if another member had opened that page or a vistor to the site?

On the wordpress blog it’s easier the software holds everything in moderation including comments and very rarely get any spam on blogger.

I would love to open it up but, would end up spending the time I should be using for posting and updating, getting rid of spam links and spam memberships, members don’t seem to mind the way I do it, in fact it has given better quality members that participate, would I of lost a few genuine one’s? I don’t know but going by the old way (running about two years) it’s seems about the same week on week.

By: Martin Reed - Blog Author

Martin Reed - Blog Author — Sun, 02 Sep 2007 08:35:46 +0000

Peter – Is there a particular reason why you manually approve and register each new member? Why don’t you let your forum software take care of that for you?

By: Peter

Peter — Mon, 27 Aug 2007 22:36:08 +0000

This is something I have paid very close attention to, all 3 of my forums have forum registration by passed with a sign up form sent directly to me, although that said anyone that knows the forums well could still get to the registration pages (and some do), but this alone stops at least 10 a week from getting on the forums that shouldn’t be there.
The ones that should I manually add.