Charles

We are working on solutions for this service. There is an added cost to run a hosted-service like the spam monitoring so there must be a price factor there. We will sort something as soon as we can :)

We have heard you and are going to look into our options on this matter :)

I am going to close this topic as the same points are being made over and over plus new readers to this topic are becoming greatly confused.

We obviously never meant for something like an anti-spam service to turn into a bad thing for some clients :)

Give us a bit and we will figure something out that works for most people.

I'm especially nice.

<-- nice

That's no fun, you should make it so if nulled boards try to use the service they'll blow up.

So now your about to do an about turn and give lifetime licenses the same benefits whats the point in having a standard license that we pay every 6 months for?

Just playing devils advocate :P

Wait, I'm confused... Does this mean nulled boards could also get this service for however much per year? Or would they have to recode their system to figure out you have an old license, and give you a special deal to get the spam service?

Thanks Matt. I await your answer :) .

The old licenses were:

Perpetual: $185 plus $30/year for technical support
Lifetime: $199 (no renewals) included technical support

Calm yourselves :lol:

We are working on options ... just give us a few days :)

Luke: you really need to read the whole topic :)

Why not charge like $10 every six months for the service for all active license holders? Then waive the fee for those people using the new Standard License system.

In the future if you have more services, you can than increase the price of the service and bundle in more services. But still waive the fee for those with the new Standard licenses.

just a thought.

Increased it today.

Ultimately it would be nice to have it completely automated, as it is time consuming to manually validate many registrations throughout the course of a day. Initially I will just watch it and see how the system flags various registrations.

Question for Invision: Will I be able to see on the Member Validation page how each new member is ranked according to your system? That would be extremely useful.

..Al

Ah yes I do see 3 other tickets in there now... it appears they were not assigned properly. I will get those fixed and a tech should see them to reply.

Yeah we have lots of options and are, of course, not going to post everything that it checks and such :)

It's already caught spammers here on our forums too which is good.

You're right in that it is easy to randomize your username and that common usernames are not as useful. However, in my experience over the past several years, I have caught hundreds of spammers based on the username alone (and in most of those cases they are fairly unique names). When you search google for new usernames, and you see a ton of forum profiles on that name returned, that's usually a damn good sign you have a spammer. I then usually click on a few to see when the user signed up on those forums. If they were all within the last day (or week), you usually have a spammer on your hands. Even with common names, if many people suddenly report that "Bob" is a spammer, then it would be good to watch over a new member who signs up on your board with that same username.

Stopforumspam.com includes usernames in their database, and I use that as a resource often. I hope you reconsider including usernames, at least as an additional data point.

..Al

For the Perpetual / Lifetime license holders who are upset:

First let me say we are not out to "grab money" or anything like that. I mean you are talking about a few extra dollars a year here - certainly not enough to get rich off. Anyone who has suggested this is our goal clearly does not recognize the years of honoring our past commitments that we have done or gone out of our way to be sure no one feels taken advantage of.

What we are doing is simply covering our costs and creating a renewal structure that allows us to offer enhanced services, like the spam system, around our products. This is why we switched to the renewal very 6 months that the Standard license offers. That renewal structure covers the increased costs services like this entail so we can offer them at no additional fee. The Lifetime and Perpetual licenses do not include that type of renewal structure.

We are discussing options internally to allow for those on Perpetual or Lifetime licenses to work into a solution without feeling like they are "losing out" on anything. We will update everyone once we come up with something. In the interim, just have a small slice of patience and understanding while we look into options. Thanks!

I hope usernames are sent also, as more times than not this is a big red flag when I'm validating new users. Many spammers sign up on a ton of forums using the same username, where they might not be using the same IP address and/or email address. I've caught quite a few this way, so I think it's important to include the username as well as the IP and email.

..Al

The IP and email of the subscriber is sent to us and we keep that information for a while to see if there are any trends and such. If there are trends and we think it's a spam account, it is permanently added to the database. If not, after a certain time, it is deleted from the temporary records.

Unless I am missing tickets, you have no open tickets that were created more than 16 hours ago. If I am missing a ticket please let me know :)

Well I suppose they could do that but that would be an odd choice.

That would just be overhead. Besides, we plan on adding more services and don't want to get into setting prices for each one. It's easier to just say they're included.

The key expires when the license does. You can renew it if you renew your license, of course.

I personally think it is quite simple. We promised Perpetual and Lifetime license holders access to IPB downloads and technical support.

This is a new service that did not even exist back then and is part of our new services plan that is included in the 6-month renewal fees. We have plenty more services planned in the future that will be the same sort of thing. They are new services - not technical support.

We are keeping our promise to Perpetual and Lifetime license holders plus keeping our promise to the new license holders that their license will include more services. We have to do what we said we would do.

We are even being as nice as we can with the way we are offering those license holders to switch to the Standard license. Lifetime people don't have to pay for 6 months and Perpetual people don't have to pay until their support would have normally expired. Of course, in the end, you don't have to switch too :)

Cool I hope you will host this project on fast enough server from start :)

And one question what happens if server is not reachable, will be users still be able to register?

I used so far SpamBot search tool and only one or two spammers get in per month. And because I care about performance I hosted that tool myself. :)

http://www.h3s.org/anti_spam/?p=view