A day in the life of a forum Admin

Rudy

Admin
Joined
Jan 10, 2006
Messages
27,638
Location
Beaumont, CA
I wanted to share a little bit of information with you about what happens behind the scenes here at FMDF.

Today, November 21, 2017 we received in excess of 400 registration requests from prospective new members. :shock: That number moves up and down daily, but it is usually in the 300 to 500 registrations/day, except on weekends, were the number of requests drops dramatically to about 10 or so per day.

You would think weekends would be the time when people think about MD'ing and joining a forum, no? Well, yes and no. Most weekends the registration requests come mostly from real hobbyists and are promptly approved by Craig (forum name Cfmct) or I. Unfortunately out of the 400 registration applications received today, only 5 were approved, the other 395 were spammers!:mad:

Fortunately most of the spammers are caught by our automated tools, but many of them get past the automated screens and then it is up to Craig and I to do a bit of sleuthing and determine wether to let them in or not. This is a time consuming task, but if you belong to some of the other large metal detecting forums, you can see the results. November to date, only one spammer got past us and made four spam posts before we disposed of him and his posts.
 
Thanks for all you and the other mods do!!! I’ve reported maybe two posts since I’ve joined and can’t recall if they were spammers or not, but sucks there are so many :(

Time to push a contribution out to FMDF again too, this reminds me!

Thanks mods!
 
A spammer got through? How could you let this happen? Freakin slackers, I tell ya'! :laughing:

No seriously, you guys do a great job moderating here and are very fair to all. I don't know what traps and walls you have up, but they seem to work very well. I'm sure the members here as a community could be more helpful as well in helping to identify such spammers, but there's truly hardly any that even make it through. I think I've noticed maybe 3 in the last 6 months, they usually expose themselves pretty fast by spamming multiple links and posts and are quickly banned. If there's really anything we can do to help you guys, please let us know!
 
Wow, 300 to 500 registrations per day :shock: It's obvious with spam being extremely rare you guys are doing a fantastic job ! :thumbsup:

I guess that explains why any members extremely rarely (if ever) see this - :spam: - emoticon used :lol:
 
Honestly, you guys do an awesome job at maintaining this forum! I only remember seeing one spammer, Merlin Rose (or something like that), and he/she got dealt with pretty quickly!
 
Well I was booted off the Views, only went there for detecting and got sidetracked I'm bad:lol:

Thanks for giving us some insight and thanks to your hard work' Rudy, and the other mods.
 
Thanks for all your hard work through the years! Although I think a great username would be: “spam I am” [emoji13]


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk
 
Wow, that's a lot of work! Thanks Rudy, Carol and other Admins for all you do. I have been a member 6 years now. This forum has been very consistent, maintained, friendly and professional. Thanks again!

:hat3:
 
You all do an amazing job maintainin the forum and keeping the junk out. Kudos to all the mods and the effort they put in.
 
Hats off to you. I admin another board and we face the same challenges over there. It isn't easy and I am glad to see I'm not the only one.

BCD



I wanted to share a little bit of information with you about what happens behind the scenes here at FMDF.

Today, November 21, 2017 we received in excess of 400 registration requests from prospective new members. :shock: That number moves up and down daily, but it is usually in the 300 to 500 registrations/day, except on weekends, were the number of requests drops dramatically to about 10 or so per day.

You would think weekends would be the time when people think about MD'ing and joining a forum, no? Well, yes and no. Most weekends the registration requests come mostly from real hobbyists and are promptly approved by Craig (forum name Cfmct) or I. Unfortunately out of the 400 registration applications received today, only 5 were approved, the other 395 were spammers!:mad:

Fortunately most of the spammers are caught by our automated tools, but many of them get past the automated screens and then it is up to Craig and I to do a bit of sleuthing and determine wether to let them in or not. This is a time consuming task, but if you belong to some of the other large metal detecting forums, you can see the results. November to date, only one spammer got past us and made four spam posts before we disposed of him and his posts.
 
I was having the same issue with tons of spammer registrations. Like you, we were manually approving new users for a while but I finally found a combo of human verification methods that have been working great.

Before the main registration page is even brought up, user must do a multiple choice image selection, then once they actually make it to the registration page they must do the google "I'm not a robot" thing, and then answer another "No Spam" verification question.

Finally, if a spambot were to actually get past all of that, we have a required field where the user must list his or her make and model of motorcycle. Spambots will just put something random here and its easy to spot, in which case I would just use the "one touch ban and clean" mod to quickly dispose of them along with anything they've posted. But they usually don't make it that far anyway. In the last 12 months we've had only 1 spammer get through, and I believe it was a human registration.

Any one of these methods alone will not work, but together they've knocked out 99.9% of spammer registrations on my site.

Maybe this combo could help you guys so that you don't have to keep approving members manually? You can find all of them over at vBulletin.org.
 

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I was having the same issue with tons of spammer registrations. Like you, we were manually approving new users for a while but I finally found a combo of human verification methods that have been working great.

Before the main registration page is even brought up, user must do a multiple choice image selection, then once they actually make it to the registration page they must do the google "I'm not a robot" thing, and then answer another "No Spam" verification question.

Finally, if a spambot were to actually get past all of that, we have a required field where the user must list his or her make and model of motorcycle. Spambots will just put something random here and its easy to spot, in which case I would just use the "one touch ban and clean" mod to quickly dispose of them along with anything they've posted. But they usually don't make it that far anyway. In the last 12 months we've had only 1 spammer get through, and I believe it was a human registration.

Any one of these methods alone will not work, but together they've knocked out 99.9% of spammer registrations on my site.

Maybe this combo could help you guys so that you don't have to keep approving members manually? You can find all of them over at vBulletin.org.

Thanks for the tip. We've used several versions of captcha in the past, but weren't satisfied with it. Our automated screens are pretty effective.
 
I worked as a mod for about a year for a high volume news site, and it is no easy task. It is a boring job on a good day and a trying job on a bad day that leaves you shaking your head and wondering about humanity.
Hats off to you guys, great job keeping this a clean site!
 
I think these guys are the best there is..
I think that we need to remember their work when we get some of our refund money back. Just send some of that stuff in to help them.
If you do not have Pay Pal, Just PM one of them for a name and address. Send a check.
If you like this forum, than help. PLEASE..

KEN :D
 
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