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Hello Everybody!

Sorry for the delay in replying to this post. I have been really busy lately and my lower back/sciatica nerve has been acting up again and I have been getting shooting pain down my left leg. Plus, with the holidays and everything else going on it has been tough staying up with the site like I would like to.

I have noticed the increase in spam lately and I am not sure why, but I did implement the following changes today that will hopefully help:

- Enabled Catchpa security image during registration process. -- This is what omega71 mention above. It has been available for these forums, but I never turned it on in the past, since I didn't think it was needed. Hopefully, it will help, but I guess there is code available for bots to bypass it. sad.gif Read the following page on Wikipedia for more details: Forum Spam http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forum_spam

- Banned the following email address extension:

*@cashette.com
*@gawab.com
*@web.de
*@mail.ru
*@list.ru

Anyone with any email address with the above extensions will not be able to post or maybe not even able to register in the first place. I looked through the list of banned email addresses I have created as I banned users over time and these were the most common besides @yahoo.com, @hotmail.com, and a few other obscure ones. I don't think I can really ban everyone that uses a @yahoo.com or @hotmail.com email address, since that would maybe even ban a few of you, but hopefully these more obscure email addresses won't block any really members from joining and posting on the forums.

- Changed the "Remove incomplete registration validations after..." setting from 15 days to 1 day. I read on Wikipedia that some spam bots delay the process of going through the email validation, so hopefully this will not leave it open as log for for them validate and it will be expired when they try.

I also see that the "Spam" forums section is filling up really quick with spam and usernames I need to delete and ban. I don't know what to do with that, since I don't really have time to ban all these people. I thought it was only a couple pages long and then I looked today and it was 7 pages long. ARGH!!!

I am looking into other things we can implement to help keep spam to a minimum. One thing that may help is if I upgrade the forums to the latest version. I am looking into this and have been working on this and other things behind the scenes for awhile now. Hopefully this will come to be sooner than later, but until then we will just have to continue to try to remove the spam when we see it and ban the people as we go.

Maybe if we didn't have to keep wasting all our time deleting spam and banning people we could get more important things done on the site. sad.gif Spammers suck! mad2.gif

I hope these changes help reduce the spam a little and I guess we will see if they do over the next few days/weeks if the spam decreases from bots. I don't think we can avoid the spam posted by a human, but the spam posted by bots would be nice to somehow control.

Let me know your thoughts and maybe we can add a few more people to the moderators staff. Actually, as the site grows and changes we will probably need more moderators to stay up with everything.

Thank you once again for all of your help and without you guys DreamStation.cc wouldn't be what it is today. I really appreciate all the help and continued support.

cnc137.