New Account Review Process for BCG?

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Abinoone

Abinoone

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Hello Steve & Others,
Just wondering what the account review & approval process is for new subscribers, and if it needs to be tweaked? We seem to be getting more lame-brained hackers junking up our forums lately. Should each new account request be vetted before it's turned loose, or would this be too much work for Steve? Could or should Steve have an assistant to weed these bozos out?
 
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At least we're not getting those who tell us that they earned $XXXXXX dollars last month and click here. Maybe cell phone confirmation when you login initially. Changing cell numbers is not as easy as changing email addresses.
 
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This guy, vk90 posted five times in the 1/2 after he joined, offering his “services” I suspect. I’d have kicked him after the first! Lol
 
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I guess it will be administrative work load, one way or another. But if this is necessary to protect the forum we love, that's the way to go, but we have to be aware that this is going to be a rat race. Whenever you come up with a solution, it will last some time until there will be persons that make a sport of it to undermine security measures in online platforms. Even if the result is n active bot, behind that there are always human idiots 😡. I hope that stelling identities is not teh next step - at least here.
 
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In my Facebook Group, I turn on "post approval" for all new accounts (unless I know the person or they are friends with and invited by an active group member). It is a little more work for me but it keeps these idiots and their bots out of my group. Our group is somewhat small at about 1700 members and averaging about 8-10 new a week. Most new members are lurkers and don't post so I only have about 10 posts a week that need approval. If a new account makes a couple posts that are appropriate to nature and wildlife then I remove the pre-approval from them. If they post spam or inappropriate things, they are removed and blocked. If I had some way to verify email or something like that I would but FB doesn't allow that for groups or pages. I do ask pre-join questions but some of these idiots will answer the questions and still spam.

Captcha and email approval would probably keep some of the bots away. I don't know. Unfortunately, when dealing on the internet, this stuff is just the nature of the beast.
 
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Perhaps new account applicants should be required to answer a few questions about their interest in wildlife and nature photography as part of their application - current equipment, experience, goals, etc. I rather doubt a bot could handle these adequately, and someone would need to know something about photography to answer them. Then, the application could go into a "pending" status, subject to review.
 
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I have no idea, how many new users are entering this forum nor how many there are at the moment, but I have seen platforms of this kind being killed by the kind of administrative job that is required to solve this kind of problem. I know that @Steve always emphasizes his neutrality and he fact that he doens't get funded by anyone to take influence on his opinion when publishing reviews, but one thing that even these days is somewhat hard-tied to a human person is payments. So , if the people that are serious about keeping this place clean digital rubbish were willing to pay a symbolic price like 1 € or 1 $, that wouldn't make anybody go bust, but by chhosing which payment channel ist accepted there should be quite a good level of infuence on who is getting in. The money, on the other hand, could be used to pay for defense measures such as license fees or such alike ...

... just thinking loud ...
 
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Woodpecker said:
I have no idea, how many new users are entering this forum nor how many there are at the moment, but I have seen platforms of this kind being killed by the kind of administrative job that is required to solve this kind of problem. I know that @Steve always emphasizes his neutrality and he fact that he doens't get funded by anyone to take influence on his opinion when publishing reviews, but one thing that even these days is somewhat hard-tied to a human person is payments. So , if the people that are serious about keeping this place clean digital rubbish were willing to pay a symbolic price like 1 € or 1 $, that wouldn't make anybody go bust, but by chhosing which payment channel ist accepted there should be quite a good level of infuence on who is getting in. The money, on the other hand, could be used to pay for defense measures such as license fees or such alike ...

... just thinking loud ...
Click to expand...
Many of us are already supporting members. Given the success of this forum, perhaps @Steve and @Rose could enlist a couple of the forum members to be additional moderators (not sure if the forum software would allow this). Steve has a photography business to run and this is ancillary to that but not his primary business focus. Having additional eyes may help.

Honestly, I'm not sure there is any foolproof way to prevent spam entirely. It is like playing the "whack a mole" game.
 
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Well, something need to change. Today, it was hard to find those new posts that were not spam. I like the account approval process. Alternatively, the post must be preapproved. Problem with that method is sometimes it can take hours or even days for the approval when the designated approver at the time is not around
 
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jeffnles1 said:
Many of us are already supporting members. Given the success of this forum, perhaps @Steve and @Rose could enlist a couple of the forum members to be additional moderators (not sure if the forum software would allow this). Steve has a photography business to run and this is ancillary to that but not his primary business focus. Having additional eyes may help.

Honestly, I'm not sure there is any foolproof way to prevent spam entirely. It is like playing the "whack a mole" game.
Click to expand...

As @Steve decided to use a forum software that, from what I saw so far and not being a forum pro, I regard as one of the best if not THE best from a user perspective, I know from another forum that this is possible, but I don't know of this involves modifications to the license he has.

But you point at an interesting aspect.
As the forum software does allow to define and manage different user roles, it might be a solution to combine certain measures, e.g. securing the login procedure for new members to a high level with symbolic payment, captcha etc. with a new entry user role. Only after reaching a certain user level, i.e. two or three levels higher than entry level, grant a simplified login procedure again. Once you trigger something like this, the hill to climb for unwanted fake users to get in should be really high and the only thing to do once after that is eliminating the users identied as spammers, bots or something alike.

IMHO with manual sorting you will most likely loose the race. but there might be clever automatic alternatives like spam filters in email software.
If you then grant the right to selected, advanced user roles to mark posts or new threads as spam there should be a chance to get rid most of the rubbish.
 
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Woodpecker said:
As @Steve decided to use a forum software that, from what I saw so far and not being a forum pro, I regard as one of the best if not THE best from a user perspective, I know from another forum that this is possible, but I don't know of this involves modifications to the license he has.

But you point at an interesting aspect.
As the forum software does allow to define and manage different user roles, it might be a solution to combine certain measures, e.g. securing the login procedure for new members to a high level with symbolic payment, captcha etc. with a new entry user role. Only after reaching a certain user level, i.e. two or three levels higher than entry level, grant a simplified login procedure again. Once you trigger something like this, the hill to climb for unwanted fake users to get in should be really high and the only thing to do once after that is eliminating the users identied as spammers, bots or something alike.

IMHO with manual sorting you will most likely loose the race. but there might be clever automatic alternatives like spam filters in email software.
If you then grant the right to selected, advanced user roles to mark posts or new threads as spam there should be a chance to get rid most of the rubbish.
Click to expand...
Perhaps limit new members to one post per day for the first week or so? I don't know the answer. Every measure taken, there are a half dozen counter measures the spammers take. Eliminating the automated bots through something that requires human interaction like Capcha or typing in answers to questions would be a start but the bots are getting better and better at getting around such measures. They always seem to be a half step ahead.
Jeff
 
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I just reported three more . It’s kin annoying. What can we do?
i am happy to help any way I can. Even if it’s just to kick the buggers off.

i like the Capcha idea
 
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