HOW TO JOIN THIS FORUM.

Make comments, ask questions, or just complain about the software on this site. Or comment on any educational software.
Please note that by clicking on links that may appear in these posts that you may be leaving the Dale Harris Educational Software website and that the content of those sites is the sole resposibility of the authors of those sites.

Moderators:daleadmin, Dale Harris, Alan, Andrew

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daleadmin
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HOW TO JOIN THIS FORUM.

Post by daleadmin » Wed Jan 18, 2012 7:12 pm

Recent events have required that we take special precautions before we allow someone to join this forum. Because there is no point in joining the forum unless you want to post to it, before you try to join this forum I am going to ask you to compose the post you want to make and email it to daleharris@prodigy.net Include in the email the username that you want to use on this forum.

Once you have sent the email, return to this forum and click the [Register] link. Follow the steps and I will receive your request to join. If I have received your email, and your post makes sense, I will appove your request to join. This may take a few hours as I may be at work or sleeping.

You will receive an email telling you you have been welcomed to the community, you can then make your post on the forum.

Dale

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daleadmin
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Joined:Tue Dec 30, 2003 9:47 pm

Re: HOW TO JOIN THIS FORUM.

Post by daleadmin » Tue Apr 11, 2017 10:39 pm

Since Jon fixed this forum earlier this year so that folks can register I have been having lots of fun.

It seems as though there are a lot of folks out there that run "bots" that try to automatically register to random bulletin boards. they then use these registrations to post spam messages on the boards. I will not go into the reasons they want to do this.

Even though this bulletin board uses a "captcha" to try to make sure it is not a bot trying to register some get through anyway and come up in the file of "inactive users". It is then up to me to separate the actual humans from the bots and then kill the bots.

It is usually fairly simple to spot the bots. Most of the bots come from the same 12 domains, death to them. No one wants to remember a string of 10 or more random characters as either a email address or a username so those get killed. For some unknown reason they think there is an advantage to randomly placing periods in their email address or a username, I squish those. This gets rid of about 95% of the "inactive users" so the remaining I copy & paste the email address and username into Google. If the screen is then filled with hits containing "bot" or "stop forum spam" I stomp on those.

Finally I send this to them in an email...
"Thanks for registering to my bulletin board. To prove that you are an actual human and not a bot, and to activate your account please, reply to this email with a one sentence reason why you want to join. Make some mention of what my BBS is about. A bot will have registered to hundreds of BBS’s today and no idea which BBS is sending this email."
If there is no reply in 48 hours I kill those.

So far this year I have killed off 685 bots and registered 3 actual humans as users. Total spam posts have been zero.

Now if I could just get people to post.

Dale

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