Current members of input.social?

[deanhills]

Hi Fitkoh.  When I checked registered members to date I noticed a great number who have already signed up.  I'm curious.  Have you already promoted the Forum. 

Are you planning to let every one know about the Forum, or is it in beta stage only?

[fitkoh]

It's currently in the planning/testing phase. I haven't  advertised it in public yet.

The porn bots have been quite aggressive. I've deleted over 400 members so far advertising adult web sites. I think this is mostly due to misconfiguration of the forums: I forgot to activate the confirmation email when accounts are registered. This has been taken care of, and hopefully will prevent most of those fake members from joining.

I don't know how I feel about advertising. I mostly prefer the word of mouth method, though perhaps some sort of hosting credit for sharing a review etc might be possible.

[deanhills]

Cool that you've fixed the e-mail feature with registration.  Let me know when you want to do the word by mouth thingie.  I'll let our members know by e-mail. And we can let them know at post4vps Discord channel.

[fChk]

The porn bots have been quite aggressive. I've deleted over 400 members so far advertising adult web sites. I think this is mostly due to misconfiguration of the forums: I forgot to activate the confirmation email when accounts are registered. This has been taken care of, and hopefully will prevent most of those fake members from joining.

If the confirmation email is already activated then I'm sorry to report that it's not working!.. I just signed up and I didn't need to do any account activation via email!.. The only email I got is the Welcome message:

Thank you for registering at My Community. Your username is fChk. If you forget your password, you may change it at https : // xxxxxxxxxxxx/index.php?action=reminder.
Regards,
The My Community Team.

I don't know how I feel about advertising. I mostly prefer the word of mouth method, though perhaps some sort of hosting credit for sharing a review etc might be possible.

Exactly how I would proceed.. But you should take care of those bots first!

[fitkoh]

The bots are pesky here. I take it as a compliment that the domain is intriguing.

Smf is a very full featured forum with lots of settings. Pages and pages of settings.

I had previously set the "Send registration email" hoping this would accomplish registration confirmation, but evidently that was a misunderstanding. I found a new setting under registration with four options:

• Immediate Registration
• Email Registration
• Administrater Approval
• Disable Registration

While dealing with the bots has been taking some time, the good news is that the process has allowed the software to learn. Each bot added to the ban list diminishes the potential for further attacks. On day 1 I had hundreds of new bot members to deal with. Today it's only 3.

Of course it's nearly impossible to completely eliminate spam members from joining, but it's awkward that it's a daily problem. I'll put it on my agenda to check out the SMF mods and see if they have something like a recaptcha for registration.

[fitkoh]

For the first time there were no spam members joined today. Perhaps the bot plague is finally over.

[deanhills]

For the first time there were no spam members joined today. Perhaps the bot plague is finally over.

Awesome!

On the topic of members.  Do you want us to let the previous vps holders of post4vps know about input.social?  I could send them an e-mail if you like. 

[fitkoh]

Looks like the spam bots are back - these ones are smart enough to make it past the email activation procedure. And rather than porn bots they seem to be advertising blogs: backlink bots. It'll take some time but I think I can get rid of most of these too. I'm seeing some patterns in the registration emails.

[deanhills]

Looks like the spam bots are back - these ones are smart enough to make it past the email activation procedure. And rather than porn bots they seem to be advertising blogs: backlink bots. It'll take some time but I think I can get rid of most of these too. I'm seeing some patterns in the registration emails.

This is interesting as it correspondence with the spam wave as well as advertising blog type spam content at Gigarocket.  I've been using the spam purge tool quite a bit there.