Dear Pakistanis and Indians

ac_ said:

Chris,

That is definitely the sucky part of owning a forum. I know how much extra work it is to fight that every day. The bummer of it is as kiwi says when you block whole countries you may block legit traffic. It is a hard line to balance on.

The hard part of the fight is they usually script that out so we need to figure out how we can automate a defense. That would be an in your face win!

Let me know if you need any help.

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I’ve got a pretty brilliant solution in place. It doesn’t just block the country, it goes off a score based system and assigns points based off several factors such as:

Does the persons user name match the StopForumSpam database?
Does their email match the StopForumSpam database?
IP address location
Is port 80 open?

And a number other factors as well. If they score 3 points or more, they are held in a moderation queue where I have to manually approve them.

I only get false positives on very rare occasions. But honestly, it’s shocking how well it’s working. I see at least 10 spam registrations a night and just laugh at it. Those guys just don’t give up.

Umbra said:

Question for Chris!
I run a FB page for a bunch of goofballs who like the same weird model of car that I do. It's a small group and I set it up as a "club", which means folks must ask permission to join.
Every day I get numerous requests for membership from folks that appear to be from the countries you describe, along with some that appear to be from Africa. These guys are usually members of thousands of other groups and appear to have absolutely NO real interest in cars at all, much less the oddball model the page is designed for. Often they have no "friends" or very few and have only been on FB a short time.I decline membership to all of them, and some will ask over and over again.

Any idea what they are up to?

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This is normal, and I would decline them too. They aren't actually up to anything to be honest. I read a big article on this and it was talking about how in those cultures, Facebook and social media is relatively new to them (newer to them than it is to us at least). The amount of friends a person has (or the number of groups they belong to) online is perceived as somewhat of a status symbol (at least as far as online goes). I guess this harkens back to the days of MySpace, where even here in the U.S., people were trying to collect as many friends as possible.

So they're just doing that on Facebook because it makes them feel accepted. It's silly and stupid, but then again, so is the idea of sharing your every waking move on social media... Like, "Hey guys, just got done taking a shit, going to go have my latte now.". I'm not sure what it is with the modern generation that makes them feel the need to share every single moment from there lives, as if people actually care.

Umbra said:

Thanks!
It's just weird.I check them out and they literally will belong to 1500-2000 or more groups.

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Yep, it’s rather annoying.