• Responding to email notices you receive.
    **************************************************
    In short, DON'T! Email notices are to ONLY alert you of a reply to your private message or your ad on this site. Replying to the email just wastes your time as it goes NOWHERE, and probably pisses off the person you thought you replied to when they think you just ignored them. So instead of complaining to me about your messages not being replied to from this site via email, please READ that email notice that plainly states what you need to do in order to reply to who you are trying to converse with.

  • IMPORTANT! PLEASE READ!! About the Google Adsense ads being displayed

    =====================
    Posted 08/15/2025
    =====================


    Yeah, I know. They are a pain in the butt. But they pay the bills to keep my server running. Just a fact of life, I am afraid.

    Want to get rid of them? Simple. Just become a Contributor level member or above and they will be gone. -> Please click HERE."

    Is that too much for me to ask of you to keep this site running? Well, sorry about that. I too wish I could get everything for free. But alas.....

    =====================
    Addendum: 01/10/2026
    =====================


    Google Adsense ad revenue for December, 2025 was just $30 over the cost of the lease for the server running this site. So, in effect, the money providing the incentive for me to continue running this site is coming SOLELY from the paid memberships and sponsorships here. Which honestly ain't much....

gmail accounts are temporarily being blocked at registration

WebSlave

WebSlave

It is what it is, but certainly not what it was.
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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 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.
 
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.
 
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.
 
Well, I unblocked gmail accounts for a few days, but the flood of spammers using that email service still continues. So I put the block back in place. Sorry, but if gmail can't better police the spammers using their facilities, then I have no choice. Legitimate members will just have to find a better email service to use.
 
Just got this email from Google:
Dear Gmail Account User,
This message is from Google Mail Customer care messaging center, to all Gmaill account owners. We are currently upgrading our data base servers, and e-mail account center.
We are deleting all unused Gmail accounts to create more space for new accounts. You will have to Authenticate your Gmail Account below to prevent a permanent closure of this email address.
Do not click on external links, authentication should be done using the authenticate button below. Successfully authenticated addresses will be automatically notified via inbox.
Caution!.... Account owners who do not authenticate their account after a month of receiving this update will have his or her account terminated.
Gmail is committed to protecting your privacy. Your sensitive details will not be shared with any third party.
Click to expand...

If I click authenticate it asks for name, address, phone #, birthday, gender, email, password, ect.
 
That is definitely not a legit email. Usually messages about updates and password recovery will come in directly in the Google Account interface when you log in. Sometimes they send emails but most of the really important stuff it will catch you when you log in.
 
:rolleyes: I'm already getting hate mail from people incensed that I am blocking gmail from the site. Yeah, THAT was unexpected.....
 
The block on gmail accounts has been lifted. My programmer gave me a tool to help deal with the spammers more efficiently.
 
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