21,000 guests?

[rockriver]

signing on showed a a few members and over 21000 guests. wow!

[Lowdown3]

So WHEN we have registration open, we get 100's of new registrations 99.9% of which are spammers trying to join. Seriously, not a typo, not hype.

So long ago me and later WW started blocking IPs that spammers were originating from. These were mainly OVERSEAS internet providers (IPs).

Well, a lot of folks VPNs bounce stuff through overseas IPs. So what pray tell happened next? People started sending hate mail to me about how we were blocking THEM, like it was personal or some stupid $hit... One guy even going full retard when his new registration got blocked, helluva nasty email. People get really when they are denied something, even when it's FREE and I pay for it for them....

Later, people were reporting not being able to see the forums at all, direct links to articles, etc. we were getting a lot of screenshots from legit people saying they couldn't even see the forums.

So we decided to UNBLOCK ALL IPs. In doing so the "traffic" numbers you mentioned of course shot up. Previously for example when we started, I have just the US and Canada able to see the forums, and this worked for a while, but spammers being the POS species they are, always adapt and change, so we have to also.

What is NOT on right now is new registrations, that means we are not CURRENTLY allowing new registrations- new people in. This comes full circle back to the for every 100 new registrations 99 of them or more are usually spammers. They are often easy to spot in registration but they register IN MASS and it was nothing to get 50-80 new registrations per day, of which we had to wade through and wipe most of them. To be honest there was a time where I simply didn't have time for that and Sherry was handling most of that. Which of course made me feel bad leaving that on her.



So how do we deal with this? We want new REAL members but getting a thousand spammers a week to wade through isn't something we are going to waste time on.

Would like all your thoughts on this as well. My current thoughts are to push a short period of time once or twice a year to "open" new registrations. Like Amazon "Prime day" which is actually 4 days now. Similar idea, announce ahead of time and "open" registrations for say a week and then close it again.

Just spitballing ideas, I am open to ideas on this. What are some of y'alls thoughts?