Keep an eye out for spammers please

Download game today
Die prematurely tonight!

Advanced search

If you registered for membership on this site but have not yet received the confirmation activation email, there are 3 main reasons.

1. It ended up in your junk or spam folder, please look there to see if it's in there.

2. You did not enter your correct email address.  Please register with a new username and the correct email address and try again.

3. Your IP address and or your Email Address is listed in the Stop Forum Spam (spam protection) database as a known spammer and when either your IP address and or your email address appears in that database, your account can not be approved.  As such if you are a spammer, please move along, our community is too small for you to bother with.  If you are NOT a spammer, contact the owners of Stop Forum Spam and get your information removed from their database and register a new account.

[City Builder]

Hi Folks,

Please keep an eye out for spammers, somehow a few hundred managed to get into the member database and were not stopped by our 'stop forum spam' system, I've cleared out the vast majority of them from the live member database but there is likely more in there that I missed, so if you come across anything that looks like spam please use the report to moderator link that appears on the bottom right of every message posted to this forum so that I can ban their accounts and delete the message.

Thank you,

[Virmin]

What exactly is the purpose of a spammer? What do they hope to accomplish?

[City Builder]

I don't know, maybe just to annoy

[CoconutKid]

I read an article "somewhere" (I didn't make a note because I did not figure I would ever be asked) which described the typical "spammer" as resident in a very poor country or living in an underclass somewhere without access to reasonable employment but with access to the Internet. They are contracted with to post in as many places as possible with some nonsense message of their won devising and a link to a commercial site. They are paid on a "piece-work" basis -- possibly only a few cents a post.

So, it is a sweat-shop operation wherein some people are exploited in their need to try to make some income. It's my guess that if one looks at the advertisers, one would find most of them to be plain scams or near to it. The posts are the cyber world's equivalent of the flier under your windshield wiper - put there while you are parked at the mall.

[Seron]

I will keep a look out and thanks for the great explanation Coconut Kid.

[Seron]

Well, I found one on the Civcity from site. Thanks for getting rid of him CB.

[Khalan]

Seem to be having a bit of an influx of new spammers lately - been reporting them all.

[City Builder]

Yup, don't know what's going on, perhaps the spammer forum database is down when they register on the site.  I'm getting quite annoyed by it so I'll likely have to look for other methods to keep them out.

Perhaps sticking all new comers to only allow them to post to a new comers forum area where they must PM me for full access, then just let that area fill up with spam and delete it all every now and then.  We don't really get that many legitimate people registering on this forum that it shouldn't be too much of a hassle to really approve them once they PM me.  I dunno, will have to see what others are trying I suppose.

[City Builder]

Well, hopefully this will stop new spammer bots from signing up.  I've implemented a key captcha where the user when he registers must put together an image (like a puzzle) to make the whole image.  If it's put together correctly, they'll be allowed to continue with the registration, if not then it stops them at that point.

We had over 11,000+ member registrations that were sitting there that were caught from the forum spam database system that we currently use and I don't know how many actually got through, as there's just too many to check against the entire member database, but I think this will stop new spammer bots from signing up, of course those spammers that take the time to hand register on every site will likely get through if they are not already in the forum spam database that we check against.

Mighty annoying, especially when it's just so pointless, they can't make any money from doing it, it's purely to be annoying at this point I think.

[Strix]

...  I dunno, will have to see what others are trying I suppose.

Well Tilted Mill have simply disabled new registrations. First of all they prevented URLs, then they had a really serious problem with Personal Message spam. Mind you I think they are a one person outfit now with Keith the moderator.

CBC have disabled new registrations as well, but it only has a small group interested in the occasional contest now but you can still get in by personal recommendation or contacting the administator and if anyone is interested you can even enter contests without joining the forum I believe.