Oolite Bulletins

Personally I find the most remarkable detail about this old story that it's the one and only time someone got banned. Speaks for the forum, I think.

And he may even have learned something from it...

Commander McLane wrote:

Personally I find the most remarkable detail about this old story that it's the one and only time someone got banned. Speaks for the forum, I think.

And he may even have learned something from it...

Very true. As on the profile page it say's "Reason: Profile details changed" I was thinking about that when I saw those profiles as well.

And we are a pleasant bunch

<removes the dust-sheet from Smivs' favourite comfy chair>

Why, thank you old chap...most kind!

Disembodied wrote:

Fatleaf wrote:

Quite often when I am looking at the Who is online page I see a few Guests that the column "Forum location" reads "registering account". Are these people who fail to register or bots that get stuck at the reCAPTCHA or a mix of both? Or even something entirely different!

A mix of both – except they're not at the reCAPTCHA stage: I think new members now have to respond to an email to verify that the email account they've supplied is real. That prevents industrial-scale bot-registration. So "Registering account" probably means "signed up but not yet responded to the email".

At one point there were several thousand "registrations" that hadn't responded to the verification email - EV did a fab job of getting rid of them a few score a day (I chipped in when I remembered)

Fatleaf wrote:

Gimi wrote:

Fatleaf wrote:

Yeah, I was thinking that. But why not just delete the profile and be rid of the fool?

Don't agree with that. Keeping the user name banned ensures he is unable to register under the same name. And also, since discussions related to this issue, and other dark things from the past pop up every now and again, it shows for all that there is a limit to what is tolerated. I think that is a good thing.

That makes a lot of sense. Also like Smivs' "Head on a Stick"

The eyeballs are particularly juicy after a few weeks for us crows.

DaddyHoggy wrote:

At one point there were several thousand "registrations" that hadn't responded to the verification email - EV did a fab job of getting rid of them a few score a day

<shudders at the memory> For a while, with the daily influx of new 'bots on top, I was killing over a hundred a day. After a while, all those crazy usernames began to make a horrible kind of sense, and I wished for a high quality hunting rifle (like a pre-'64 Winchester Model 70 - a beautiful rifle, is that) - my katana was worn-out!

It's definitely worth killing bots at the pre-registration stage. I'm just glad it's not as mental as it was when EV was clearing the ground with napalm ... I'm maybe seeing half-a-dozen a day on average now. But it prevents the hard-to-spot "decloakers", where spambots would leave (perhaps deliberately) a week or two between signing on and actually registering, meaning that they probably wouldn't appear as "Our newest member" and could only be spotted if someone noticed the change in the member count and checked the member list. Plus, it can identify spam farm IPs and email domains before they break through onto the boards.

Disembodied wrote:

... clearing the ground with napalm ...

I love the smell of napalmed spam in the morning!

I tried to resist saying that... but couldn't!

It's actually quite difficult to say "napalmed spam". Before the second coffee of the day, at least ...

Yayy back to slicing spam for breakfast: Feeling useful again

Just for a certain Spam Assassin who has a special relationship with the tumbleweeds: http://izismile.com/2013/01/31/driver_v ... y_day.html

Ah yes, the tumbleweeds of Aquti... when they attack in numbers like that, they can be deadly!

One internet connection connected and a CBM defeated. So many unread posts!

Time for a brew.

Fatleaf wrote:

One internet connection connected and a CBM defeated. So many unread posts!

Time for a brew.

One sugar in mine please

Fatleaf wrote:

One internet connection connected...

That didn't take too long - only a month or so. Three sugars for me, por favor.