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Old 01-01-2010, 02:11 PM   #1
Rich Z
Exclamation New registration audits

For those lurkers who are considering registering here, I would like to offer some advice. Spammers on message boards like this have become a real problem, so I have had to take the step of setting new registrations to be approved before being allowed to post on this site. What I do is to review the new registrations (I try to do that at least once per day), looking for cues to indicate that the new registrant may be a spammer or otherwise bogus. Entries within the profile fields are scrutinized looking for clues, so if you are inclined to use nonsensical, flip, or obviously improbable entries, then there is a real good chance you will be denied entrance. Yeah, some legitimate registrants will likely get stopped at the door in this manner, but quite frankly, I just got tired of the porn spammers and those promoting viagra and crap trying to flood my sites with that garbage.

Other signs I will look for is the location field not matching with the IP address of your ISP. If you claim you are from New York, USA, yet your ISP's IP address says "Texas", well not going to happen. My assumption will be that you are trying to hide something. So, sorry......

Typically most of the spammers lately have gmail email addresses, so they are getting closer scrutiny then say, a comcast.net email address will. Oftentimes those email addresses will appear bogus just from the name used, or the fact that the email prefix name (which is an apparent random mixture of letters and numbers) matches their registration name, so they often get deleted just based on suspicion.

So all I am asking is that you be a bit circumspect about the info you include in your registration to try to help everyone here to keep this site from having to deal with that type of garbage. If your registration gets deleted during an audit, then I would suggest that you review your answers to those registration queries and make adjustments if you care to try again.

Sorry about this headache, but trust me, I wouldn't waste my time on it if I didn't think it was prudent to do this chore.

Thanks,

Rich Z.