**warning**

Our site seems to have been found by spammers. Each day we seem to get anywhere from 6-10 new members who appear to be spammers. They usually use a user name that makes no sense what so ever. An example of some are:

fghi1234
pqrs2987

They use letters of the alphabet followed by numbers. Or they are using a capital letter followed by small letters:

Jtecrcox
Gdpakshw

As you can see these addi's make no sense and they are spammers. Nivek Wahs and myself are fighting desperatley everyday to keep these people off the site and are banning them sometimes two and three times a day or more. Please when joining use a name that looks legit and not similiar to any of the above. If you do use an addi similiar to the above we have no way to know it is legit and as we have been doing, putting on a permanent ban, so please if you are trying to join the site use an addi that is not similiar to the above. If you are banned in error try to contact someone you may know on the site and they in turn will hopefully contact one of the Mods.

Thanks in advance

Scout ( Super Moderator )

hey man, thought you should know there is a much easier way to get around this.

There was a major problem with spammer on another forum I post on, that is also the same type of forum like this, and it was getting really aggravating.

Now it may seem a bit absurd or "too much" but the best thing to do here is to have any new members approved by the moderators. Otherwise more and more spam will continue to appear.

We are working on this right now. I'm going to contact HAF now and see if this can be done. Thanks for the info.

Scout

no problem man. Anyway in giving a helping hand.

It's tough to stop those types because of their usage of proxies. Using a proxy changes the IP randomly, so unless you feel like banning the same guy 90 times, that may be the only way unless you have a proxy code which detects when a user is using a proxy.

If you want the proxy code to install it, PM me. I have ran a site in which I had the same problem, but found that this code works well when accepting applications.

Thanks for the reply. Can you please forward the info to Nivek Wahs.

Scout

I think those new members are randomly generated by a computer program as the names really a) do not make sense and b ) are very noticeable.

We've gone to approving each member on another site I am moderating and that seems to have moderately stemmed the tide.

I'd be interested in seeing this proxy code stuff though if that would help these kinds of "members" joining.

We have had a program in place where all new members have to be approved by the admin. The problem is, all of these new spammer accounts have never been approved. Somehow we have been hacked. All of these spammers have found a loophole in the system some how. Until I get some help from the person holding our server, there is nothing I can do to fix it. I will keep working on it however.