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Marshall Harrison - "the gotspeech guy"

Site news, Speech Server insight and assorted ramblings
The bad guys make it tough for all of us

Recently we have had a rash of new users with email addresses using qawab.com for their domain. None of these users have posted anything or even visited after they signed up.  I've also been receiving a lot of spam at my email address on GotSpeech.Net. A little investigation (means I Googled) shows that these two things are related. They are evidently created by bots for some purpose but I'm sure they are up to no good.

So...I've banned the offending user accounts and I have temporarily set the new user roles up so that all new users need admin approval.  I will do my best to monitor and stay on top of new member registrations so that they can get approved as soon as possible. Perhaps in a week or so after these attempts stop I can remove the approval requirement.

I don't like doing this and it is something that I have managed to avoid for 8 months now but I have to stop this. Please bear with me for a few days then hopefully we can get back to normal.

Note: I have one more domain that I'm investigating and I may have to ban it also.

Posted: Wednesday, November 08, 2006 9:29 PM by marshallharrison
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Comments

Ahmed said:

How about adding some CAPTCHAs features to the registration process to help with weeding out bots?
# November 8, 2006 7:47 PM

marshallharrison said:

That could work but I'm not sure if this version of Community Server supports that. I believe it is a feature of CS 3.0.

I'll look into it so thanks for the idea.
# November 9, 2006 4:35 AM

Marshall Harrison - "the gotspeech guy" said:

As I wrote about in " The bad Guys make it tough for all of us " I've set the site parameters so that

# November 22, 2006 8:00 AM

Marshall Harrison - "the gotspeech guy" said:

The spam bot attacks have really died down so I'm changing the new member policy again. New members no

# November 29, 2006 6:52 PM
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