Enough is enough!

[Dave]

Members,

This morning I have just disabled all new registrations to our forum indefinitely. This will not affect existing members at all, only new people who want to join.
It will also not affect anyone who wants to read the topics.



Over the past 6-8 months, Doug and I have had to deal with almost 10,000 new registrations, the vast majority of which are spammers. That's about 45/day. Many of these get handled by our automatic systems, but as the spammers try new tricks, we have to spend more and more time qualifying and monitoring them.

If we allowed these spammers to post here, our forum would quickly look like a garbage tip and we would be swamped with complaints from genuine members. There are also serious security risks involved for members who may follow the spammer's links.

These attacks go on 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. Doug and I have to be constantly vigilant to keep them at bay. It takes up much of our spare time, it's stressful, draining and leaves little time for working on maintenance and further development of the forum. It also adds massive bloat to our database.

The 'open door' policy we have adopted for the past 16 years has to end.

Doug and I will work out a new registration system to stop this nonsense. But it will take a while to put together and we won't be rushing it. All new members will have to provide a lot more information and demonstrate a genuine interest in Douglas machinery.

If you have any ideas, comments or suggestions, you are most welcome to post them below.

And if you know a genuine Douglas person who wants to register, contact us via PM and we will work with you to register them manually.

Dave
Site Admin

[cardan]

I'm sorry to hear that, Dave.

Forums - this one in particular - offer so much more than the here-today-gone-tomorrow world of social media. I hope you can find a viable solution!

I guess you need to ask for something a bot can't do: perhaps two sentences on "why I want to join the forum", and then moderate the first three posts? What a drag that it is so difficult.

Keep up the good work.

Leon

[Doug]

Dave and I are fifteen time zones apart and so in effect have two shifts monitoring around the clock. Reviewing new member registrations looking for spammers that get past the automated systems and hide among the valid member registrations is taking more and more time away from other Forum administration tasks. I should say valid applicants hiding among the spammers as the ratio is more like twenty bogus registrants to one genuine registration.

We cannot sit in front of the computer the entire day. Fortunately we can check in frequently and between that and a core member group that visit often, nearly around the clock, and report spam (which notifies our email) as soon as it is posted, we can rush in with the mop and clean up their garbage and ban them. But having that garbage on the site even for a minute is offensive and a risk. Douglas motorcycle enthusiasts visit here to read and post Douglas topics, and expect to see only Douglas topics. Coming across spam infuriates us.

Our core members can only help us once a spammer posts spam. They don't always post right away, selling the registration to other spammers to use later. Hence admin likes to find and eliminate them at registration. As said more and more time is being consumed lately vetting member registrations. The automated systems use to work very well and still are blocking a tremendous amount of spammers (thousands), but the spammers are getting more clever and using artificial intelligence combined with cheap manual labor to create seemingly real membership registrations. 

There are things that can be done to make it more difficult for the spammers, and we are working on that. In the meantime self-registration is suspended to provide time to work on the issue and other Forum maintenance. As Dave mentioned, new member registration is not entirely shut down but it will require more determination on the part of the applicant as they will need to contact Admin to be manually registered.

Updates will be posted here in this thread.

-Doug, Site Moderator

[DJS]

Wow - I was aware that spammers register/try to register on forums for their own needs but had no idea of the scale of the problem!
All I can say is thank you to Dave and Doug for the huge effort you are clearly putting in to this forum to keep it as "clean" as possible.

[Dave]

Here's just a small sample of the spammer invasion. This lot arrived in the first nine hours of yesterday before registrations were disabled.
This is a fraction of one page and there are over 45 pages of them plus a whole lot in another queue.
Every one of these people wanted to post some sort of garbage. Possibly not just one post, but as much as they could before they were banned.
Even if just this small sample were successful in posting one post, it gives you an idea of the mess it would make.

[Alan]

Dave...on a similar theme, just this am received a begging phone call on behalf of the "firies" ie the bush fire brigade...sure enough a scam and warnings out already via Facebook etc...absolute vermin !!!!!

[roger h]

Sorry to hear of this. I'm afraid the world is full of evil people spoiling the internet, which should and could be a wonderful thing to help humanity. My computer has just recovered from a hacking, hopefully I'm OK now.
To the administrators - a big thanks for the work you do which enables us to have one of the best old vehicle sites in the world - please don't be discouraged.
Best wishes,
Roger

[flea]

cant understand what the scammers get out of it besides causing trouble , keep up the good work as sites like this would not exsist without you admins

[Dave]

We have been trialing a manually operated system for the past three months and so far it seems to be working well.
New members email us with a short note explaining their interest in Douglas and we register them manually.

We have had about fifteen new members joins us since February, and all applicants have had a genuine interest without a single spammer attempting to apply.

Not having to fend off spammers all day, has allowed us to work on overhauling images and attachments.

If you hear of anyone uncertain about registration or having difficulty, please ask them to email registrations01 (at) douglasmotorcycles.net and tell us about their interest in Douglas machinery.