Spam Service - Why Register Then Ban?

[Robulosity2]

Consider the demands (resource wise) for even a small DNSBL. These would pretty much equal if not be lower than that of a hand full of users utilizing the IP Board Spam Registration protection.

It's dooable, but would require sacrifices or offloading it to customer servers.. I'd be more than happy to allow Inivison to run a script on my server to act as a p2p but than again, that would also create problems due to malicious site owners ;)

In regards to the ban thing, Hide banned members from the public user lists.. Problem solved

[Wolfie]

The idea I'm suggesting would be to do a secondary check on a low-key basis, that way you get the benefit of a second check when there might be a positive hit while not putting a major toll on the service. Checking the same accounts time and time and time again gets wasteful.

[AtariAge]

[quote name='.Wolfie' date='17 August 2009 - 08:41 PM' timestamp='1250559678' post='1845449']
The idea I'm suggesting would be to do a secondary check on a low-key basis, that way you get the benefit of a second check when there might be a positive hit while not putting a major toll on the service. Checking the same accounts time and time and time again gets wasteful.

I completely agree that as time goes by, it becomes less and less useful to check new accounts. In my experience there isn't a large lag time between a spam registration and the spam that follows, if the account is validated immediately (via email validation). If there is a delay in validation, this seems to slow them down a bit. I've actually seen spammers come back and post several weeks after an account has been validated. For the purpose of a spam service, after the first few days if you don't get any "hits" on an account, it's probably benign. At least until the spammers get smart and start planting accounts and sitting on them for a while before activating them.

One thing that could help cut down on the number of accounts that are checked is to ignore accounts that have made 'x' number of posts in the forum (posts that haven't been deleted). 'x' could be as low as one for this purpose. Presumably after a user has made one or more posts that haven't been deleted, then that is a legitimate account and there would be no reason to check it against the spam service. So at that point you'd only want to send recent accounts that don't have any active posts.

Of course, Invision will have some interesting statistics on all this down the road. I don't expect them to share that information, but it would be nice to know how many forums are using the spam service.

..Al

[AtariAge]

[quote name='Robulosity2' date='17 August 2009 - 08:24 PM' timestamp='1250558645' post='1845442']
In regards to the ban thing, Hide banned members from the public user lists.. Problem solved

Yeah, this is what I do on my forum. It's useful to keep banned accounts around so you can see if new spammers are signing up with the same IP address. Perhaps this will be less of an issue with the spam service serving as a central repository of these bad IP / Email addresses.

..Al

[bfarber]

[quote name='AtariAge' date='17 August 2009 - 09:10 PM' timestamp='1250557855' post='1845437']
Now, I'm speculating here, but assuming there are "tens of thousands" of Invision boards out there, I would imagine that only a small portion of them are huge boards that get 100+ registrations a day. And of all those boards, not all of them are going to be running the Spam Service, which is off by default. While this problem would require careful engineering to ensure it's not a huge resource drain, I really don't think it's an insurmountable problem.

..Al


I can assure you, there are. Though I have no statistics on how many are "big" and get 100+ registrations a day, nor do I have any statistics on how many use the spam service. But if you stop and think about it, the service is included at no additional charge for all new license purchases, so any new purchases made will most likely make use of the service. The number of users using the service is not likely to plateau, but rather to continue to grow.

[Andy Millne]

So back to the original problem of having banned users cluttering up the members list, is there a solution to that?

[Alex K.]

You can set a usergroup to not display on the memberlist. Group Settings > Hide this group from member list? > Yes

[Andy Millne]

[quote name='BacTalan' date='18 August 2009 - 02:13 PM' timestamp='1250601217' post='1845647']
You can set a usergroup to not display on the memberlist. Group Settings > Hide this group from member list? > Yes


Cool thanks, does that group still count towards the member count statistic?

[Andy Millne]

Hmmm something seems to have changed in the way groups are handled in 3. The spam user is now in group "Members (Banned)" and my banned group is empty. Is this group now redundant? If so how do I apply your suggested change?

[sunrisecc]

I use both methods of banning currently. The original (pre 3) group I use for permanent banning and does not display anywhere. I use the new method of banning mainly now. I will probably move old entries from members (banned) to the banned group after (as yet) an undetermined time.