Anything Forums

Some changes have been made to this board as part of a cleanup.

* An enhanced post validation system has been coded, and still needs to be tested. I have opened the flood gates, so to speak, and I'll see how this system can handle all the spammers, and make sure their spam does not make it public in any shape or form. There is a lot of testing to be done, and as I find flaws I will fix them.

New member posts are visible by that member, and also visible by admins, but not visible by anyone else. There is the odd chance they show up in systems that I overlooked (search, now that I think about it) but they will be eradicated as I think of it.

Whenever I log on the forums I will be presented with a list of posts to validate. Spammers are immediately removed.



* Medical Data Processing Lab forum has been merged with Software and Hardware. It was originally for UD and F@H which pretty much died off. UD itself has died, and our folding team never really took off. In the future maybe things will change as the site gets popular again. We'll see.

* Removed group "crunchers" and these users have been added to "ice age members"

* IceTeks Changes forum has been merged into The Daily Freeze

* Cool Hangout Place forum Has been renamed to Off Topic (since the category is called Cool Hangout Place)

* Cybervillage Talk has been merged with Off Topic

* The Daily Freeze has been moved in Cool Hangout Place category, and category Site-Related removed

* Changed some forum names/descriptions

* Did a bit of a member pruning. Noticed lot of trash posts which I believe may be decoys to test the waters for spammers, such as users that come to post a few pictures hosted on spam sites randomly and never show up again. I will continue to delete such posts as I see them.


If the post validations are simply too much to handle, I will look at blocking all IPs from China, India and all those other spammy places, to see if it helps.

Archived topic from Iceteks, old topic ID:5166, old post ID:39417

I'm doing a lot of permission fixes too, wow it was a mess. I hope I did not lock anybody out of anything, or did something stupid.

It's funny, it seems the spammers have slowed down. Maybe they realize they are wasting their time since even if they do post, nobody sees the post anyway.

Archived topic from Iceteks, old topic ID:5166, old post ID:39424

didn't get locked out but sure got in the forum fast this time.

yep you are correct i've told that to others before in other forums that the spammers post messages that seem correct for the forum but are just ways to get the bots to have an access port in to the forum.

your the first one i know of that is trying to block that by hunting those posts down and removing them.
first besides me that is i find them and mark them as spam.

i don't think the others realize that they are really what can be called spy posts as they sit there on the inside of the locked door and unlock it for the spam bots.

they try to hid links in the text of the posts, in forums where they can put a link and not have it underlined they get away with it. so making all links show an underline and a changed font color is helpful in finding those posts.



Archived topic from Iceteks, old topic ID:5166, old post ID:39427

Did a few minor fixes. Mostly aesthetic. There is a known issue where if someone makes a new topic, when I approve it, it will appear to have a reply. The fix for this would be rather complicated so I decided to leave it. When someone replies to the topic, it will fix it.

Overall, the site is pretty much ready for a bombardment with spammers, and nobody will feel a thing. Ironicly, they slowed down, a lot. I only have to validate (aka deny) posts once or twice a day.

Archived topic from Iceteks, old topic ID:5166, old post ID:39468