Important, please read! Changes in user groups and permissions.

[Moses]

Hello everyone!

We are under spam-attack of very sophisticated bots and I must to change our forum's user permissions to deflect this attack.

Normally we had 3 grades of users below admins and moderators: Unregistered / Users Awaiting Email Confirmation / Registered Users (almost all are in this last group for now) .

Starting today I will implement 3 more groups: Newbies (less than 3 days here or less than 5 posts) - Advanced User ( longer than 3 days here and more than 5 posts) - Senior Users (more than 180 days here and more than 100 posts and more than 100 points of reputation).

Permission for Registered users will be very limited: no private messaging, no avatars, no signatures, no... let's say: Registered Users will have almost no rights, except text-posting and reading, and even posting will be 100% via moderation till their promotion to Advanced Users.

Advanced Users will have the same rights what all you have now, so mostly changes will be in the name of the group where almost all of you are.

Senior Users will have more permission on the forum (more messages in PM, more bigger limits for uploading pictures and some other "candies".

Why I wrote this message then? Because each group has around 150 different settings, because promotion from one group to another will be done by robot. It will promote you all to Advanced Users group soon. So some mess may be expected for first few days. In case you will meet some errors or restrictions which you hadn't at past - please feel free to write it below this post (preferable), or contact me via PM or via contact form at the bottom-right corner - gray menu "Contact Us" point.

Sorry for troubles and thank you for understanding.

Moses

[Gaybutton]

I'm sorry the spammers found this board, but I'm glad Moses knows how to deal with it.

[cdnmatt]

Sorry to hear it. Why not just disallow proxies until say 50 posts? Here:

http://maxmind.com/

They have various databases available free of charge, including one that will inform you if the IP is a proxy or not.

[frequent]

I'd have thought most of our regular members (The Welsher aside) are already "senior"

[arsenal]

Moses wrote:
"We are under spam-attack"

Could be worse. Could be fish paste. Haha. You either get it or you don't.

[bobsaigon2]

Yes, could be fish paste or Marmite or Vegemite. (Sorry, Aussies. I did try my best to become friends with Vegemite, but it never worked out.)

[bobsaigon2]

Moses, what are "points of reputation" ? Same as Likes ?

[Moses]

Moses, what are "points of reputation" ? Same as Likes ?

Oh, almost. When ppl give you "likes" here on forum, robot counts these "likes" and adds some points to "Reputation" for each "like". So it is counter's name. By traditions it named "Reputation" or "Karma".


Sorry to hear it. Why not just disallow proxies until say 50 posts? Here:

http://maxmind.com/

They have various databases available free of charge, including one that will inform you if the IP is a proxy or not.

That will not help: I'm about "very sophisticated" - even reCaptcha doesn't recognize bots :(

We are lucky: for now it is about only 4-5 per week. May be my word "attack" is too strong :) It isn't DDoS - it is infiltration for future spam.


I'd have thought most of our regular members (The Welsher aside) are already "senior"

Yes, I know. If you will take close look, you will see difference in names btw "Senior User" and "Senior Member". First is group's name, invisible for users. Second is user rang (in terms of forum's software) and located under your nickname on forum. I wrote warning and explanation what I will do just to give all idea what is going on in case you will find some permissions are gone. Then you can write here and I will fix it.




Could be worse. Could be fish paste. Haha. You either get it or you don't.

[irony on] very funny [irony off]

yes, I know originality of word "spam"

[bobsaigon2]

….. When ppl give you "likes" here on forum, robot counts these "likes" and adds dome points to "Reputation" for each "like". So it is counter's name. By traditions it named "Reputation" or "Karma".

Karma? I love it. So if I get enough likes, my karma will improve, and if it’s really very, very good, then in the next life I can come back as someone special, maybe like a very pleasant version of Dorian Gray (minus that tell tale portrait), forever young, every night frequenting the Soi Twilight bars – if they are still there. Got this today from one of the capitans at Dreamboys:

“Now Dream boys very low. I have Salary there and Extra money for drinks for boy, 2nd drinks and introduce boy to customers. Before, Extra money they pay every 1st Saturday of the month. But now didn't get that. Very very Bad. And, Customer very low”.

[cdnmatt]

Then just put the site under https://cloudflare.com/. It's free, and is excellent to help prevent DDOS attacks. It's not full proof of course, but it definitely helps, to the point it's a requirement for any new clients of mine.

I have my own sites under CloudFlare and can vouvh for it. Again, it's free. You just need to switch the domain's DNS over to CloudFlare's nameservers, and the site will be far better protected against bot attacks. Again, not full proof, but nothing is in the online security world. However, without question it helps greatly.

[Moses]

Then just put the site under https://cloudflare.com/. It's free, and is excellent to help prevent DDOS attacks. It's not full proof of course, but it definitely helps, to the point it's a requirement for any new clients of mine.

I have my own sites under CloudFlare and can vouvh for it. Again, it's free. You just need to switch the domain's DNS over to CloudFlare's nameservers, and the site will be far better protected against bot attacks. Again, not full proof, but nothing is in the online security world. However, without question it helps greatly.

once again:

It is not a DDoS

[cdnmatt]

Your site, so up to you. You're getting spamed by a botnet, correct? Put CloudFlare on the domain, change the status to "Under Attack", and in 5 minutes the attack will be greatly reduced if not stopped completely.

Again, your site, so up to you. :)

[Moses]

You're getting spamed by a botnet, correct?

nope... one or few very sophisticated bots, what makes registrations and really emulate human's behavior... Cloudflare helpless in that case... I need to have buffer group where Akismet will kill em... unfortunately forum by default promote everyone to Registered users, so I have to change "Registered Users" group as buffer group and move all real user to another group - it will be "Advanced Users". "Registered Users" group will be honeypot for bots.