WEB RING

[iceman]

Every now and then when I log in I come onto this webring like I just did and I copied this that was on the side.

I said before that I couldn't help but think that's where all the spammers are from or hearing about this forum from its instant access to many sites

and they sign up for them all and upon approval start doing whats been happening.It just seems like too much of a coincidence when that started so did the spam.
Traffic has increased alright. Just a thought...

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[borisattva]

thats a reasonable idea, and i'm sure that some spammer traffic comes from following links on other rings.
however, most spammers simply have automated web crawling scripts that search for strings like "Powered by phpBB" (which is required to be displayed), or posting.php (in the url) or if a particular board version has a known vulnerability (which i stopped displaying few years ago).

as far as outsourcing registrations to other services so that people who registered elsewhere automatically become registered with us - i considered that a while back, but i decided against it because quite a few spammers come from @gmail.com or from facebook and those are the two leading outsource account services out there.
the 'few' spammers that do get through to us, are actually a very tiny fraction out of many (hundreds weekly) that get rejected, or get stuck in the confirmation process.
these are performed by actual people sitting at a computer (as opposed automatic scripts) and there really is no effective way to stopping them from accessing the site, except to enforce a manual activation of ALL new account. i tried this a few years back and due to a high volume of automated registration attempts the queue would become backlogged and people ended up waiting weeks to get in.