Happier Abroad Forum Community

Hi all,
I've been receiving occasional emails that the IP bans here against trolls and spammers are starting to block legitimate posters. A lot of the spammers are using proxies and cloudflare, which have public IP's. So by blocking them. we also block legitimate innocent posters as well. What should we do about this? Just unban all the total IP's that are banned? All new registrants are now put on moderated status for their first few posts anyway, so that should be enough to filter out the spammers. I think that's the best solution for now. I've already PMed the moderators here and told them not to ban any IP's anymore.

Anyhow, if you are one of the legit posters who have been affected by the IP bans, let me know and I will try to fix your account or unban your IP. You can email me from the home page. But you should be able to log in now anyway, and view the forum, after I unban all the IP's.

I understand the desire for anonymity, but why don't legitimate posters use a private VPN instead of publicly accessible proxies? The cost is trivial.

Unfortunately, putting newcomers on moderated status will probably not fix the problem. It is easy for trolls to make several innocuous posts, and then, when they lose their moderated status, start trolling vigorously.

Did you talk to Fschmidt about the issue? He has a technical background.

gnosis wrote:I understand the desire for anonymity, but why don't legitimate posters use a private VPN instead of publicly accessible proxies? The cost is trivial.

Unfortunately, putting newcomers on moderated status will probably not fix the problem. It is easy for trolls to make several innocuous posts, and then, when they lose their moderated status, start trolling vigorously.

Did you talk to Fschmidt about the issue? He has a technical background.

Maybe because private VPN's slow down browsing speed? My VPN slows everything down and that's annoying. Plus public proxies are probably free and people prefer not to pay if they don't have to.

Well in my experience, spammers usually won't go through the trouble of making normal posts while on moderated status. They don't have time for that and are impatient. Plus, most spammers are bots, not humans so they won't do that anyway.

I sent this thread to Fschmidt, but he doesn't respond much anymore. He seems to be busy.

Yes. Even my IP address gets blocked now and then for few days before automatically allowing my IP. I think its done by a bot. It would be good, if I can post stuff everyday, but bot blocks as it thinks all posters from India are spammers which is rightly so

starchild5 wrote:Yes. Even my IP address gets blocked now and then for few days before automatically allowing my IP. I think its done by a bot. It would be good, if I can post stuff everyday, but bot blocks as it thinks all posters from India are spammers which is rightly so

There is no bot in the forum that blocks IP's from a certain country. We have to manually enter each IP to block. It's a pain. But there is a feature that allows you to check new registrants with a spam block list from a third party website, which has a blacklist of all known and reported spam IP addresses. However, that feature slows the forum down, so I won't use it for now unless I need to.

I've already unbanned all IP's in the forum that were banned. So if you were innocently banned by IP before, you should be able to log in now.

For now, moderating all new users has worked out fine.