The spammers, pornsters and druggies have been signing on en masse lately, and a good half of them seem to be using the @gmail domain for their registration email address. I guess Google made it too easy for them. We also see a lot of Yahoo addresses used by the undesireables.
Whenever a spammer signs on using an email address from their own site that is obviously made for their purposes, we can ban the entire domain and slow them down for a while. Or anyone we have seen so far with a .ru suffix has been a spammer, so those get banned (if C-Dory gets a dealer in Russia, those poor folks will have some problems getting in here). But banning a popular domain like Google or Yahoo isn't a good idea because a lot of genuine folks use them. And banning the individual complete addresses isn't too effective because most of them are just random gibberish created solely for the purpose of spamming forums.
But, since Bill is out of cyberspace for the moment, I had me a vision of nerdness. Because Google is the greatest offender, and it is fairly new, I was thinking of adding the entire domain to the ban list. Hence this Poll to see how many of the active users are registered with the @gmail domain. The Yahoo domain is also included in the Poll. (Hotmail doesn't get used much by the spammers. I guess what Bill says about MS being the best is true.) If the number of registered members is very small, we might pursue a change in the signup policy to require an email address from an individual's ISP instead of a web-based freebie. That might slow down the spammers and bots enough to let me spend more time reading the posts and less time scouring the memberlist.
As always, though, remember that unless you provide your personal contact info on the public message boards, the software here still prohibits people from finding your actual email address.
Thanks,
Mike
Whenever a spammer signs on using an email address from their own site that is obviously made for their purposes, we can ban the entire domain and slow them down for a while. Or anyone we have seen so far with a .ru suffix has been a spammer, so those get banned (if C-Dory gets a dealer in Russia, those poor folks will have some problems getting in here). But banning a popular domain like Google or Yahoo isn't a good idea because a lot of genuine folks use them. And banning the individual complete addresses isn't too effective because most of them are just random gibberish created solely for the purpose of spamming forums.
But, since Bill is out of cyberspace for the moment, I had me a vision of nerdness. Because Google is the greatest offender, and it is fairly new, I was thinking of adding the entire domain to the ban list. Hence this Poll to see how many of the active users are registered with the @gmail domain. The Yahoo domain is also included in the Poll. (Hotmail doesn't get used much by the spammers. I guess what Bill says about MS being the best is true.) If the number of registered members is very small, we might pursue a change in the signup policy to require an email address from an individual's ISP instead of a web-based freebie. That might slow down the spammers and bots enough to let me spend more time reading the posts and less time scouring the memberlist.
As always, though, remember that unless you provide your personal contact info on the public message boards, the software here still prohibits people from finding your actual email address.
Thanks,
Mike
