gmail accounts are temporarily being blocked at registration
 

I'm getting an inordinate amount of spammers flooding the site the last few days trying to register, and around 95 percent of them are using gmail accounts for their registration email. Apparently gmail has NO method of restricting registration to legitimate users, so I am forced to block ALL registrations using them as their email provider in order to try to slow down this onslaught of bogus registrations.

Yes, I know there will be some collateral damage concerning legitimate registrations, but I really have no choice. Wading through 50 to 60 registrations every day solely from these spammers is not something I really care to spend my time on every day. So this is one way I am trying to combat the problem. Deleting or banning those accounts has had no effect. Banning the IP addresses they use does not help neither, as they apparently simply use an almost inexhaustible supply of others at their disposal.

Sorry, but I have to do what I have to do. When the storm is over, I will re-enable gmail accounts, but for now, if that is your email provider of choice and you have not registered here yet, then I suggest you try another provider if you want to register here at this time.

ur right rich,, to much spam these days for sure,, i am a gmail user but already here and i am sure many of us, so i hope we dont get the boot when this happens,, all info good to know,, thanks mark

This shouldn't affect current accounts, but honestly I've never done an email service banning like this before. Yahoo has been a pain in the butt over the years, but it's been at a manageable level, so I haven't had to do something drastic like this.

Unless the goal of the spammers is to just aggravate me, it's a fruitless effort on their part. They can't do anything on this site till they are registered, and I am kicking their butts right at the entranceway. There are sites where I can get complete lists of IP addresses by country so I can block entire countries at the server level, which I may have to resort to. There are several that appear to be the major sources of this crap that I certainly could live without if they were blocked completely. I just have to be careful that too much of the server processing power is spent blocking spammers to the point where the entire site suffers because of it.

I use Gmail exclusively, as long as password requests can still go through, and such

I also use gmail and recommend it. I probably am missing something here but this line confuses me


" Apparently gmail has NO method of restricting registration to legitimate users"


I'm not sure what you mean by that. Wouldn't this be resolved on your end by having the party who is trying to register receive a confirm link sent to them to prove the email exist and that it is not Bots. or add a captcha to the form. or do you think there are actually people doing this with valid email address... are there actual names or are the names just odd text?


Gmail is highly used and highly thought of. One should not use their ISP domain as their email since this becomes an issue when you decide to go elsewhere.


I apologise in advance if I am not understanding the issue at hand but this is a common problem and there are solutions other than banning a domain.


Good luck


Bill

I have a series of about 10 question and answer challenges for registrations that get cycled through at random. The email address used must also be verified by clicking on a link in an email sent to them upon registration. That means that the email address they use must be legitimate for them to receive this email. Otherwise they remain in another member group that is designed to hold registrants that are in limbo until that email gets verified. I audit every new registration and block any that are either obviously bogus, or even just somewhat suspicious. If the IP address does not resolve to their stated location, they get the boot. If random text is in any field, they get the boot.

Even apparently legitimate members will get blocked if the profile fields are not properly filled out upon registration.

I used to use the CAPTCHA method instead of the text question/answer challenge method, but I heard that it got cracked a while back and was no longer a reliable method of blocking spammers.

Yesterday I changed ALL of the questions and answers in case the spam bots had identified the questions and automated the responses to them. That did not slow down the spammer registrations even a little bit, so apparently there are REAL people involved or some very sophisticated AI programming techniques now in the spam bot code.

I have ceased blocking IP addresses for blocked spammers. I was at around 700 blocked IP addresses, and I believe that many could cause more problems then it would solve. It could burden the server to have to check that list of each and every IP addresses for every viewer coming to this site, so I had to abandon that method because of the sheer size of the list and the possible negative results.

Blocking gmail does seem to have quieted things down quite a bit. Hopefully I won't have to keep it blocked for too long. I know some legitimate people do use that email host, but I had to do what I had to do.

Believe me, I did not want to block gmail, but what other options are available when a large proportion of the spammers are obviously using that email service? And yes, this IS a GMAIL problem. They are the ones accepting registrations from those spammers for this purpose.

It is NO accident that you don't see spam on this site. Without such safeguards as I have put into place and man at the door, this place would be completely overrun by spam in pretty short order.

There was a lot of effort put into that response and I do appreciate it. I understand you placing blame on gmail but they would not be aware of why one was creating an account. My gmail account goes back to the days of getting into the trials and then only by invitation but now anyone can create an account, in fact, multiple accounts. So the obvious issue is that today it is gmail, tomorrow it's another domain. You can't block everyone but you could possible stop this in a way you have so far resisted,,,,

Pay to join.... Doesn't have to be a lot. $10 a year. You provide a wonderful forum and one that is well worth it. You could argue that you owe it to your members to do so. It not only weeds out spammers but also helps weed out scammers. My son and I are both members and as soon as we get our business started we will purchase a membership and advertisements for that. I would gladly purchase personal accounts to be able to post and view the boi's

He HAS tried pay to join, lets not go into that again ;) After being here for MANY years now, ive seen this suggetion time and time again, even supported it until seeing it actually hinders how the site works. I think there are many security features that still work that can be implemented, i will do a little research myself and post some ideas later.

I should have added that we are new to this forum. How did the Pay to join hinder how the site works? There is already a pay to be a certain type of member so how did pay to even join make it different? I'm not arguing I'm just asking. When was the last time it was tried. I'm not sure sure what script or cms is being used but if they were the cause of the problem maybe that's no longer the case

At various times I tried to implement a paying member requirement to post on the BOI and again once to post classified ads. There was never a general payment requirement to just be a member with posting privileges over the majority of the site. Neither of the two attempts I made were well received at all. Matter of fact, both incidents generated quite a bit of nastiness from some of the membership. The idea behind the requirement for the BOI was to attempt to force legitimacy on every person who could post there. And, of course, the same concern applied to the classifieds section, and was designed to try to generate a revenue stream for this site as well. I was sincerely concerned about the survival of this site back then when all income here was based solely on donations based on the generosity and support of the membership. I feared that it would not be enough to keep us afloat. Sponsorships and advertisers were not really a very large part of the equation back then, and even to this day this site does not really have larger commercial concerns spending advertising dollars here. But all in all, things are much better now than they were back then, so I'm comfortable with the way things are going.

As for implementing a sitewide requirement for paid membership to do anything on this site, I think such a change would kill the site pretty much immediately, based on what I have seen take place in the past.

So no, I don't foresee that sort of scenario of a blanket paying member requirement ever taking place here. Honestly, I doubt very many, if any, message board sites have ever been able to survive doing something of that nature.

This spammer wave will likely blow over sooner or later. They are NOT getting into the site to post anything, can't contact any other members, actually can't do a darn thing, and generally are just wasting their time registering here. So eventually they will go away. It's not like I'm going to suddenly change my mind and allow them entry here. I can certainly delete their accounts much faster than they can create them. Fortunately I am retired, so the time constraints aren't taking me away from the more pressing issues of working with animals. It might delay registration approvals of legitimate members a bit longer, and of course some legitimate gmail users are going to be blocked for the duration, but it is what it is, I guess.