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Old Nov 26, 2013, 11:23 PM
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Liontamer Liontamer is offline
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Join Date: Sep 2007
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If you're willing to give me limited forum admin privileges, namely the ability to delete accounts/posts, I wouldn't mind cleaning out a bunch of spam accounts. One thing that helped OCR was setting it up so that all new accounts have to be manually approved by a forum admin, which we've done since 2009. I then went back and deleted every spam account I could find from our forums (there's no point in keeping them), and I manually approve all forum sign-ups for the ability to post.

Potential signs; the homepage link is spam, the IP resolves from India or Bangladesh, the first octet of the IP is 49, 58, 108, 113-125 or shows as "Could Not Resolve Hostname", the email address is from a disposable email service. The email looks like "FirstnameLastname123@".

Really, the smoking gun is the homepage link, since most spambots populate that field, followed by the signature. The important point is not to be trigger happy and to only delete obvious spam accounts. Occasionally, a bot may get through but it's better to play it safe, and any garbage can be erased if one gets through.

Speaking from experience, there's no reason to merely ban accounts; once you know it's a bot, you might as well delete it. There just needs to be a system in place to have a trusted staffer who likes grunt work to screen new sign-ups as they come in. I'm not saying I permanently want that role, but I've done it for years, and wouldn't mind helping out on that level and putting a framework in place. :-)

TL;DR - I'm willing to help remove the spam accounts, just gimme some forum privs and lemme at 'em.
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