Smartest board on the Internet. I think it’s the lack of avatars that keeps it that way.
Private message spam is just part of their warm, rich culture, one which we should strive to understand and respect. When I get such an email from Africa, I envision not a nuisance, but a vibrant marketplace, children laughing, and women in colorful flowing robes. For every African spammer, there are thousands of legitimate businesspeople, struggling to make a living and better their lives. This might be one of them. To reject business propositions from Africa is to reject Africa itself.
Hang on, you’re honestly saying that you get people who will e-mail you to complain about the registration process being too difficult? That’s a special sort of person right there!
But that can’t happen a lot, can it?
It all comes down to what’s worth more – the long term members scared off by the spam PMs or the new members scared off by the longer registration. I’m not sure how you can measure the first really, although you could take a bash at the second.
I don’t think it’s that big a deal. But then requiring a certain level of posts / participation to use PMs isn’t either – people coming to the board to only use the PM feature are (for the most part) going to be spammers, stalkers or worse. If I recall we didn’t always even have a PM feature …
I know there’s a perception that this board is resistant to change (which isn’t always a bad thing) but maybe you could trial these things once in a while. You can always changes things back.
You got what, 1500 new members in the last month or so, right? You can compare that to last year to work out the ratio. Then predict the number you would get in the next month, turn of the limitations and see if you get more or less members.
If you really want to drive new blood to the site it’s better to actually try things and monitor the effect.
As far as I know, we’ve had only a handful of PM spammers in the history of the board. Two of them were discussed in this thread and two others in this one. Based on something that rare we’re hesitant to inconvenience a large group of potential posters. I don’t think a lot of new people sign up and start sending PMs instead of posting, but you can do that for non-spam reasons. I’m concerned that we’ve had two of them in two days, and if this becomes something a lot of spammer do I think we’d have to consider something like limits on PMs for new members. So if you do get spammed by private message, please forward the message to the mods and let them know who sent it.
Marley, better to be proactive than reactive. PM spam has been a problem on message boards for several years. It’s prevalent enough to be a frequent subject of discussionamong message board administrators. The problem of PM spam became widely known in 2008, when a Buddhist PM spam spree hit thousands of message boards.
The usual methods of blocking registrations from the Axis of Forum Spam (India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, Russia, Belarus, Ukraine, Vietnam, Philippines, China, Nigeria), known proxy servers, and spam-friendly email domains, are increasingly less effective. There’s now PM spam bots, too; a spammer from an Indian “link builder” will register manually through a proxy at a US- or UK-based hosting service, and once they’re in, run the bot. There’s also likely a bunch of “sleepers” on the board; accounts from those who might have registered months or years ago.
That’s true. But at the same time, we don’t want to put off a large number of people to deal with a minor problem. If it’s becoming a bigger problem here, that changes the equation.
In the vBulletin admin menu, there’s an option to delete all PMs sent and/or received by a user. Surprised the powers that be haven’t done that with our Ghanaian spammer friend. If they haven’t, the PMs are probably taking up space in the database, sitting in the inboxes of hundreds or thousands of inactive accounts.
Private Messages for omanemining (userid: 134972)
Folder Number of Messages
Sent Items 5
Remember, Guests can only send 5 PM messages at a time. There’s also a pretty healthy floodcheck between PM mailings, so I think we’re bound to catch someone/something before they got too busy.
Yes, there are spambots out there now that do PMs, I saw a webpage for one this morning, in fact. I hope there’s a special place in hell for the writer of that software.
Are there hundreds or thousands of PMs sitting in inboxes on the Dope? Hundreds, perhaps – with moderators and administrators leading the way, overwhelmingly. I see no unfamiliar names with oodles of PMs, so that leads me to believe that we have not been – thus far – overrun with PM spambots.
