Quote:
Originally Posted by IvoryBeast
I sent one of the ass-hats a friendly welcome to the board message on his wall... But it didn't seem to deter him.
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That's because it was a bot, not an actual person. These ass-hats build up large botnets composed of hundreds to thousands personal computers infected with malware. Then with a few commands, they can trigger their army of bots to do all manor of nastiness from sending out thousands of spam emails, to signing up for user accounts at forums with low registration restrictions like this one.
Most forums require a valid email address to register, so they can send you a confirmation link via email to prove you're a real person. This eliminates probably over 90% of the bots. This forum chose not to implement this feature (built-in to the forum software) not because they don't care about spam, but because they felt that it would discourage a lot of potential users who'd like to join and participate, but wouldn't care to have their user accounts linked to their email address. Many of us have multiple "throwaway" email accounts for this purpose, but not all users are that knowledgeable. I'm sure we have at least a few users who are, um, "technology challenged," and have difficulty even finding the on/off switch on their computers.
I fully understand Rape Board's position on not requiring email confirmation for registration, and I'm by no means criticizing it. However, it does leave the forum far more vulnerable to attacks like the one we had last night. Everything in life is a tradeoff. On the other hand, it's clear that with programs like the U.S. NSA's PRISM, they could link your activities here back to you, email or no email, if they really wanted to.
Another spam prevention tactic the admins could consider (already built-in to the vBulletin forum software) would be requiring all posts from new users (less than a certain number of months and/or fewer than a specified number of posts) go into a "moderation queue" where they sit until a Mod reviews them. This would require some additional effort on the part of the Mods, and would incovenience legit users whose posts would be delayed for a few hours to a day or so, but it's probably no more work or inconvenience than hunting down and banning the spambots when they strike.
The Admins may have thought about this approach too, and decided against it for legitmate reasons. I'm just a lowly user like the rest of you, and not privy to the Admin's thinking on such matters, though I do have some experience in running a vBulletin forum (though mine wasn't dealing with a highly controversial subject like this one does). I'm definitely not criticizing them in any way. I think the Admins and their Mods do an excellent job, under the circumstances. But as a network admin and a tech junkie, I'm always looking for better and easier ways to do things.
