Spam prevention measures, changes to notification emails

[regic]

We made some changes to reduce the risk of bots registering accounts, and to reduce the risk of SPAM.

1.  A captcha code was added to the registration form.  New users must now type the 5 digits in the captcha image in the space provided on the form when registering.  This is to prevent automated SPAM bots from registering.

2. The number of recipients a personal message may be sent to at one time has been reduced to 2 from the previous 10.

3. Post text and PM text will no longer be included in notification emails.  Instead a link to the post, thread, or PM will be given in the email.

[stardust]

I surely do like #1, even tho it's an annoying pain.  Don't care about #2.  I personally wish you hadn't done #3 -- it was nice seeing the PM/post in the email. 

Edit.  Forgot to add:  Thanks for taking care of this kind of thing so quickly!

[bargainbloodhound]

[quote author=stardust link=topic=4706.msg20342#msg20342 date=1155200522]
I surely do like #1, even tho it's an annoying pain.  Don't care about #2.  I personally wish you hadn't done #3 -- it was nice seeing the PM/post in the email. 

Edit.  Forgot to add:  Thanks for taking care of this kind of thing so quickly!
[/quote]

We might change #3 later.  We'll probably leave it off until the eBay boycott is over, and until we find out more about the bot problem on the SMF forum.

[Jen]

All very great decisions.

At flightnursing.com we had a "member" register, and then post PMs to everyone in the memberlist.  Unfortunately, the PM text was included in the message.  The PM text included an obscene picture, so before I knew it I was added to many spam blacklists by people who didn't want to see this particular member's "shortcomings" and complained via McAfee or Norton.

Of course, I'm fighting the SPAM blacklist charge (AOL, Yahoo, SpamCop) - all members had agreed to private messages being delivered to their mailboxes.  However, it's the biggest fiasco we've had there in the last 8 years.  So, I decided that PM texts will not be delivered with the notification of PM - so that if I get notice of such a stupid thing, I can delete that member's account and all of the undelivered PMs.

Anyways, just the other side of things.  The text of the PM is convenient, but unfortunately ads a vulnerability to certain kinds of abuses.

By the way . . . when you ban a member in SMF you can add a message to be displayed when they try to sign in.  My ban message was that his winkie was too small 

[stardust]

Sounds like the same spammer we had, Jen......  : 

[Jen]

I guess I missed that . . . for some reason I don't get the PM notification emails.

[bargainbloodhound]

[quote author=Jen link=topic=4706.msg20985#msg20985 date=1155773466]
I guess I missed that . . . for some reason I don't get the PM notification emails.
[/quote]

He hit 2 of our forums.  Both were running SMF 1.1 RC2.  The "member" appears to be a bot and has hit mannnnny SMF forums.

for some reason I don't get the PM notification emails.

Check the notification settings in your profile. 

If you ever get hit again you can run this command on your database to erase all PMs the member sent (substitute the member's name for user name and change the table prefix if your're not using smf_ as a prefix)

Code:

DELETE FROM smf_personal_messages WHERE fromName = 'user name'

[Jen]

When I banned the member, then deleted him, it gave me the option to delete all posts/messages.  I wasn't sure if it deleted the PMs, so I went into PHPMyAdmin and checked the personal messages thing, and all of the ones he sent were gone.  So, that was a nice surprise, that SMF makes it easy to do all that.

About the PMs . . . it's something on my side of things.  I have it set to "always" for the email notification of PMs, and you guys are added to my white list with my SPAMkiller software, but somehow I just don't get them.  I think McAfee Spamkiller filters things out, even if the sender is in the whitelist, I've had some issues with receiving mails from Amazon too. 

[BellisimaJ.]

By the way . . . when you ban a member in SMF you can add a message to be displayed when they try to sign in.  My ban message was that his winkie was too small  happy001