Due to all of the spambots going around (80% of new accounts are fakes) we’ve had to switch to manual account activation meaning that it can take a while for your account to get activated depending on how busy that admins are in real life.
If your account isn’t activated within the week please drop us a line and don’t forget to mention your account name!
If your non-activated account suddenly dissapears please create a new one and drop us a line, an overzalous admin (probably me ) probably classified it as a spamaccount and deleted it.
I’m currently looking into ways of keeping spamaccounts at bay so we can go back to automatic activation of accounts, but it’s not looking too good atm
If you want the real statistics that I have kept over the last year – only 3% of account requests we have had have turned out to be geniune. 97% of the others have all been fake.
The complementary instructions that phpBB send out when one attempts to register is in error in many ways. The email claims that when the said account is activated that an email will be sent to the subscriber informing them of this – but this step doesn’t happen.
I have quite often received emails from propspective subscribers asking them if their account is enabled (which it normallty is – I’ve gotten quite good at spotting fake accounts. :P) because they’ve been sat there waiting for a comfirmation email. Although quite why they just didn’t bother to try and login in the first place is beyond me.
The problem doesn’t really stem from the fact that it’s an FVWM forum issue as it does a fact that we’re using phpBB (i.e. a really easy target). Personally speaking, phpBB should ship blocklists of domains known to cause issues and employ that within their own filtering system they have.
I haven’t been keeping exact statistics myself, so I was a bit afraid of overdoing the number…
The filtering measures they provide aren’t adequate either, one can only block on e-mail address, not on other data a user might enter like the website they enter, automatically purging all porn and drug accounts would become a lot easier if this were possible…
phpBB development hasn’t exactly been fast either resulting in a software package that’s in fact out of date and imho it’s starting to show too. Luckily they’ve started releasing betas of phpBB3 which will hopefully hava a better administration interface (I haven’t tried it yet)…
Since it makes no sense to have a membership in FVWM forum unless one is posting, why not delete all memberships that have zero posts. I doubt that the porn hawkers are able to posit a valid question to this forum.
Spammers muck up the membership list. 800 of the 1500 members on FVWM have zero posts. Again, why be a member if one is not posting?
If you use this criteria, you can automate the new member process, and automatically remove a new member applicant if they don’t post within 24 hours.
No. Absolutely not. This is something the SymphonyOS project did without so much as a by-your-leave, and despite my best efforts they still went ahead and did it, alienating a number of people along the way. This is something I certainly will never do. Note that just because someone has an account registered, and not posted anything does not mean they’re not part of the community or unworthy.
Identifying spammers amongst potential valid account is quite an easy heuristic, and when the next version of PHPBB is released, deleting accounts will be much easier, for me at least.
See above. The count of “memebership” is flawed anyway since it doesn’t bifurcate that number based on activated accounts, which is what it should have done from the outset.
) probably classified it as a spamaccount and deleted it.
