Members vs Guests?

[necro_phil]

There are many members here, but it seems that hardly any of them post anything. And I sometimes see that there are many "guests". I take it that these quests, because they are not members, can only access the public message boards? Most of the people online, in fact, at any given time are not members. Interesting...

[Nyghtfall]

I'd bet a week's pay that over 95% of the "members" here are bots that slipped through FF's anti-spam system over time and have simply never been purged. Most "guests" are automated spiders crawling through the publicly accessible sections of the site for indexing on search engines.

[Max5s]

That’s interesting, Nyghfall. I thought that many were members who visit regularly but just don’t log on every time they come here. I’m glad you were kind enough to give a better explanation.

[necro_phil]

That makes a lot of sense, and I wouldn't have thought of that. Thanks!

[Olberon1024]

Select all images with
dead female bodies

Sorry, I'm not clever enough to create a Captcha example...

[Nyghtfall]

Select all images with
dead female bodies

Sorry, I'm not clever enough to create a Captcha example...

Captcha's are only a stopgap and easily thwarted, depending on their complexity.

I bought a plugin for my board, Visions of Darkness, that replaces the standard registration form with an anti-spam form when it detects bots. Since installing it in February, it's blocked nearly 400 bot-based registration attempts.

I also started deleting inactive accounts to rid VoD of any potential bots last July. Inactive accounts include anyone with zero posts who haven't logged in for 365 days. I don't mind lurkers, but you have to log in at least once a year to stay active. I had around 3200 "members" when I started the project and had manually purged nearly 2,000 accounts by the time I discovered a plugin to automate the process last November. As of today, there are 1,052 accounts on my member roster, and there's no telling how many of those are bots who made it past my original anti-spam mechanisms. Nearly 200 more accounts will be deleted if they don't log in by next November.

One of my member artists used to announce various milestones in our member count as the number of registrations increased. I kept wishing they were all people. Hence, the measures I outlined above that I've taken to keep VoD clean and organized. Once the other 200 accounts are gone, I'll be able to move forward running VoD with reasonable confidence that all remaining members are people.

Both plugins cost $40/yr for support and updates and they're worth every penny. I still use a Captcha though because, IMO, admins can't be too careful with spam. I also recently employed a new free plugin that rejects registrations that use disposable emails. I value peoples' privacy, but disposable emails are extremely popular among spammers and equally difficult to verify.

Furthermore, I manually approve all registrations, and, as VoD's last line of defense, manually approve all new members' first few posts. Once I've ensured you're human, the system automatically promotes you to standard access.

[Wemmick]

+1 Nyghtfall !
Good move.
It is such a tedious work to get rid off dead wood.

[Olberon1024]

Glad you're taking the extra precaution to protect your website.

[Indrid Cold]

Captchas are the worst. They are a fucking nuisance to deal with when just trying to log in and they don't filter out squat, especially in this day of vastly improved AI.