Attention! - Wild Texas Forums: Parks, Travel & Recreation

Shannon · 08-11-2006, 10:42 PM

ATTENTION ALL:

ALL Guest/Unregistered User posting privileges are hereby suspended due to excessive spammer activity against our domain. It's the only way I can have a life and not have to check in on the site and spent 20+ minutes deleting spam every hour, day and night.

ALL new users must verify their email address as valid before receiving status as a Member, and with that, message posting privileges. If you fail to verify your email address as valid, your posting privileges will remain inactive until such time as you do so.

If this does not significantly curtail the spam activity, we WILL take other measures until the problem is properly addressed.

That is all.

My sincere apologies to those of you who have been posting as Guest/Unregistered users who will now need to register if you intend to keep posting here. Blame the spammers of the Earth...

Turn Key · 08-12-2006, 08:14 AM

Thank you

!

Happy Camping!

campermom · 08-12-2006, 08:46 AM

Spammers

Shannon · 08-12-2006, 11:58 AM

Don't be surprised if it gets a little too quiet in here for awhile. These changes I've reinstituted have an adverse impact on post counts at least until folks who want to participate bite the bullet and register. (Free, easy, you don't have to give your real name or any other info, except you MUST have a valid email address and validate it.)

Spammers can bypass this by the way but I have other means to thwart them, though it's still time consuming on my end.

MissionCamper · 08-12-2006, 01:07 PM

A jeep forum I frequent went as far as to no longer accept Yahoo email addresses for their registration process. I've been kind of wondering at what point you'd finally have to cut off the "unreggies".

Shannon · 08-12-2006, 03:15 PM

It's not just Yahoo addresses, unfortunately, and many legit folks have and use Yahoo accounts. Same for AOL, Gmail, etc. Some of the domains are overseas -- .ru (Russia) and such. Some are other people's domains but with fake addresses created from them. It's all over the map. Also, much of the recent spam has been from spammers who take the time to register on the forums. Unless every registered user here wants to have their posts moderated (would drastically increase my workload and would cause new posts not to display until I approved them), there will STILL be some spam that gets through. If it is at the same or similar rates as it has been, we'll address that with other methods. Almost none of the spammers register with a real email address, and that is why email validation for new users is again turned on.

We've done a lot behind the scenes, but just like terrorists, spammers' techniques evolve and what used to work ceases to and requires new (and more time-consuming) efforts on the part of site owner's and forum administrators.

srds · 08-13-2006, 12:01 AM

You are doing a great job.

thanks
srds@family

Cube · 08-15-2006, 09:12 PM

As a moderator elsewhere, I can tell you it's a pain.
Shannon does a good job here!

Thank you very much!!

Shannon · 08-17-2006, 03:01 PM

If you are a newly registered user here in on WildTexas.com within the past week, your access is now updated. We had a minor glitch that I unfortunately didn't understand and correct until just now, leaving our new users trapped in an endless cycle of email verification without access.

You are good to go and all future new users will go through the process without the glitch. Note: You must still verify your email address or your account will remain in a limited access mode until you do so. There is nothing I can or will do to increase access of users who fail to validate their email addresses. This is a must due to the spammer activity.

Apologies, again, to our new users. WELCOME TO WILDTEXAS!