Recent Posts

Pages: « 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 »
21
I use gmail and get a notification on one thread I follow each day.
However, even if I don't get notifications I visit first thing every morning.
22
AOL, which yeah, I should probably have dumped years ago, randomly throws some in spam and delivers the rest. It does that with a lot of things.

I'm hoping people who are interested will check once a day or so and see what's new. That's a more reliable way of knowing what's going on.
23
I've started getting notifications that gmail and some other sites are now rejecting emails sent out by the forum because this site had passed some failures threshold they have.

2 things seem to have happened lately.

The first was gmail added the forum to a spam list.

The second was a huge increase in spammer activity. This has probably resulted in the failure threshold being crossed, since the majority of the registration attempts never get their emails for various reasons, and thus never go live.

Just now though normal emails being sent out for thread posts just got rejected.

So just be aware that some sites are not passing your forum mail along to you.

Quote
Domain writersanctum.com has exceeded the max defers and failures per hour (5/5 (100%)) allowed. Message discarded.
24
Forum Announcements [Public] / Re: If you decide to delete your account, contact me.
« Last post by Bill Hiatt on February 15, 2024, 09:20:14 AM »
There's always a balance, true.

If it's just a site to display your books, there are limits to what bots can do. If you allow comments, it's easy enough to moderate them and prevent spam manually unless you have huge traffic. An ecommerce site might be trickier, but more because of what hacks against the guts of the site might cause rather than what a frontend user might do.

If I recall, you do your own programming, which gives you the advantage of structuring security how you want. I'm reliant on others, but generally, I have a site that functions well without excessive security routines. The only thing that irks me a little is that when CloudFlare updated recently, I find myself verifying I'm a human every time. It's just a checkbox, but still, I could probably do without. But if I wanted to, I could lower the security there and rely on my other precautions (like WordFence on the site itself). So far, my legit traffic hasn't dwindled.
25
Once the company clamped down, all was well. But it illustrates that uncontrolled sites get flooded very quickly.

The challenge is blocking spam while not terribly inconveniencing legitimate users.  There are some sites I don't/can't use anymore because I can't get past their anti-spam procedures.  They probably don't miss me.  But, whether I am building a site for eCommerce or for my books, I don't want a single legitimate user to slip away.  I'd rather get some spam than block a real person from contacting me or making a purchase.
26
Forum Announcements [Public] / Re: If you decide to delete your account, contact me.
« Last post by Bill Hiatt on February 15, 2024, 03:51:25 AM »
Unfortunately, the internet has long been a place where bots will try to create accounts anywhere there's a space, just in case the account can become a way to propagate spam.

When I was still teaching, I had an problem with a company providing supplemental classroom websites. It forgot to activate the anti-spam precautions. So instead of just having my students sign up (which would have been about 120 people at the time, I woke up one morning to find I had over a thousand "people" signed up. The bots had no knowledge of geography and just put together random locations on the signup, so that someone might claim to be located in Las Vegas, Nigeria or Istanbul, Finland. Once the company clamped down, all was well. But it illustrates that uncontrolled sites get flooded very quickly.
27
Given that I hardly ever see spam, it appears that the system is working well.

It seems to.

Lately I've had more to do, but the spammers don't appear to realize that in 4 clicks, I can get rid of them and everything they try to post.

I'm having to delete a lot of registration attempts as well, as most seem to not get the forum emails, so they never actually sign in. I'm being a bit ruthless with them at the moment.

One issue is gmail seems to be spam blocking the forum too. So some genuine attempts to register might not be happening.
28
Forum Announcements [Public] / Re: If you decide to delete your account, contact me.
« Last post by Bill Hiatt on February 15, 2024, 01:28:01 AM »
Given that I hardly ever see spam, it appears that the system is working well.
29
Forum Announcements [Public] / Admin is on duty.
« Last post by TimothyEllis on February 13, 2024, 11:33:52 PM »
What measures are in place to ensure that the moderators maintain a fair and unbiased approach towards enforcing forum rules, especially considering the recent changes and potential influx of new users in the forum's better accommodations?

That's a strange question.

There've been no changes here in several years.

And there've been no moderators here since 2019. We haven't needed them.

Most of the new users recently have turned out to be spammers, and been deleted.

The majority of the rest are not posting, just reading.

Or are yet to identify themselves as spammers.

30
Forum Announcements [Public] / Moderators are on duty.
« Last post by DanielToisa on February 13, 2024, 08:14:32 PM »
What measures are in place to ensure that the moderators maintain a fair and unbiased approach towards enforcing forum rules, especially considering the recent changes and potential influx of new users in the forum's better accommodations?
Pages: « 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 »