Deleting accounts

Alexander · Joined: 13 Dec 2024 Posts: 100 Location: Germany

Hello.

I'm currently cleaning the account database to remove all crap accounts. This is a slow and bothersome task, because I must go thru the accounts one by one (I caught one spammer live yesterday evening). I haven't counted but I think I've deleted over 200 accounts so far. This totally sucks as no one has cared for it so very long. I've spend more than two hours on this already, and I'm not even halfway thru... I'm just glad to have a big Deli playlist to play along, this allows me to listen to some music I've played rather seldomly so far...

I'm deleting all accounts that have:

a) zero posts & an obvious spam URL in their profile
b) zero posts & no other info but a username & mail address in their profile

I've been careful, but you never know. So, if I mistakenly deleted a legitimate account I'm sorry - but it happened because the profile contained no information that allowed me to determine it is a real user. In that case - please, don't be angry, but simply register again, and enter some useful information in your profile that allows me to verify the subscription as a forum user.

I have also blacklisted the most obvious email addresses that have been used to subscribe to the forum (one HAS TO approve the subscription to the forum by email). If a legit user can't register because of this, please let me know.

The "flooding" time has been increased. You can only send one post per minute now. I think this is not a big issue for the real users.

I haven't got a clue how "they" manage the large number of subscriptions to our forum, but I assume it is simply some sort of script. Version "2.0.15" of phpBB is not the most recent one (which is "2.0.18"), but the changelog of the later versions shows no vulnerabilities that would allow mass subscriptions without verification.

Muerto · Joined: 22 Dec 2023 Posts: 122 Location: Denmark

Super! but sorry to hear that it´s a slow, painstaking job (i rather read/anwser post in the forums!!)

Keep up the nice and nessesery work
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Alexander · Joined: 13 Dec 2024 Posts: 100 Location: Germany

Of the 700 acounts last week, about 165 "real" accounts are left. The rest was crap accounts of spammers. I listened to a lot of music last weekend, believe me...

I deleted over 500 accounts. One by one. Look up the account name in the memberlist, open the account in the management panel, wait for the page to load, verify its really a crap account, check the "delete" box, click "submit", wait for the page to load, look up the next account name in the memberlist. 500 times.

I've told Florian to apply measures to avoid the automatic sign-up of spammers. This includes limiting access to the memberlist to administrators and exclusion from robots.txt (the spammers create backlinks to their site this way to increase their google or whatever ranking) and introducing the CAPTCHA image verification during signup.

I hope he'll find the time to do it soon, I can't do this myself. Today I deleted 8 or 9 accounts again. Its a nuisance to go thru this every day.

Herr Weltschaft · Joined: 07 Nov 2024 Posts: 6

I'm glad someone is finally taking care of this.

Thanks, Alexander.

wilson · Posted: Fri Dec 09, 2024 3:14 pm Post subject:

Yes, thank you very much indeed. I do not envy your task, but your efforts are duly appreciated. For once, a preemptive strike actually seems to bring some good...

'nuff politics.
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