Happier Abroad Forum Community

Ok whew!

I just installed a mod from the phpBB support site, which allows me to mass delete users and spammers at once. Using that, I was able to bring up all users with zero posts, which are likely to be spammers, and mass delete them all at once.

Then I repeated the process with users with one post, two, and so on, retaining only the users I recognize as legitimate posters or are unlikely to be spammers. With that, over 5000 spam accounts were eliminated from this forum! Hurray!

Thank God for mods. Otherwise, there's no way I could delete 5000+ spam accounts one by one. It'd take way too long.

Next, I went through the memberlist, having trimmed it to just over 300, and deleted the few remaining that had porn sites linked to their profile, which I can see easily next to their user name.

So now we are down to the number of legitimate accounts here, which is only at 310. So, I guess we never really had 5000+ registered users after all, since all but 310 of them were spam accounts. Darn.

Anyhow, I don't think I deleted any legitimate accounts, but if I did by accident, then I apologize and invite you to re-register.

The thousands of spam accounts here with links in their profiles to porn and viagra sites, I think, is what brought this site's google page rank to zero, and why this forum has been banned from Yahoo search. So I hope that with this mass pruning that I did, all that will be fixed and we can be indexed properly.

So that's the update.

I'm still looking for other ways to combat the daily spam problem here.

Thanks,
Winston

Hi all,
I have an idea. Since the human spammers who come here everyday are likely to be from India or China, like Momopi said, how about I change the humanizer question on the registration screen to something that only westerners would know, and that people in India or China would not likely know?

Can any of you think of any? Like something culture related?

Any ideas?

Attention everyone:

I just deleted thousands of spam accounts by pruning all users with zero posts. If any of you are lurkers out there with zero posts and your account was deleted by mistake, I apologize. You are free to re-register, but next time please at least submit one legitimate post so your account doesn't get deleted again when I prune thousands of spam accounts and clean out the forum, which I do once in a while. Thanks for your attention.

Most spammers are from South Asian countries. Check for IPs from India, Bangladesh, and Pakistan.