Yesterday I just posted that (above). Today, in less than 24 hours we have now 823 members! ...That's 99 more new members!
Ok, how could that be? Is the same thing that it is going on over at AudioAficionado starting to infiltrate us as well?
Bob - I can assure you we are not creating fake members or anything, but we do have an onslaught of spammers. This is a major problem with all forums. They register and then wait in the wings. Spammers are pretty hard to deal with. Our forum developer(s) are quite experienced with how they work and know that the spammer teams involve both humans (to bypass human registration questions) and bots. They target forums and they first visit it by a human employer who notes and answers the human verification question you ask in the registration. Then they program that answer to a bot computer and bot sends tens/hundreds of new registrations requests to that forum fully automated. Most of them are rejected since forum will ask different human verification questions for these requests but depending on the number of questions you have some of them will pass through when forum asks the question their human employer ran into.
Using image verification also does not work because they also have algorithms to bypass them automatically too.
There are sites like
Stop Forum Spam which helps a little but they are not 100% efficient because spammers acquire new IPs everyday so making an IP check against a ban list is only partially helpful and can't catch every one of them.
Using another spammer stopper hack from vbulletin.org etc. is also sometimes helpful. It usually works for a while but if it becomes popular and many sites start using it, they notice the hack and build algorithms to bypass it.
So, out of the funds from the donations from our members, we have purchased software and paid to have it setup and installed. But PLEASE NOTE, that this program will only stop some/most new spammer registrations from this point on. It is NOT effective against spammer accounts who already registered until today and is now a member.
There are a lot of these accounts on our board. At least 100 registered just for today. These accounts can stay dormant for days or even weeks but afterwards they can start posting spam (via posts or pms). Since our program will only stop new registrars we still need to deal with existing accounts. Joe and I are trying to ban/remove them now before they start being active. We can understand them from "dubious" usernames and email addresses which might not like to be used by real humans. Eg. usernames like "ddk6zdel5k", "UnparpPak", "lwalnbpq" etc are definitely
spammer accounts as well as users with email addresses like "nikeshoesoutletforsale.com", "ach.olawa.pl", "nokiamail.com" etc.
We all need to continue to monitor the site because those dormant accounts we may not catch, may become active. Joe and I can only do so much (thank you Joe!) so please you keep an eye as well.
Our new software can be tweaked a little, so if we find real people can't register due to the questions, then we can adjust.
As a side note, our site is growing legitimately. Just do a Google search for "Raidho D3" or "D'Agostino Preamp Review" for example and you will see all our hard work is paying off! People run searches like this all the time, all over the world. Our dominance on Bing and Yahoo is even greater than Google. This has taken months of hard work and a lot of money. Anyone that knows SEO will concur.
I can assure you, we are growing organically. We are doing the right things and correcting any mistakes along the way. I have some great plans for Audioshark - one which will include a separate used audio site to take on Audiogon head on. Membership options are also planned - one day. Stay tuned. Fast your seat belt and hang on.
Thanks.