New registrations

[admin]

Spammers have been driving me nuts here lately, so I enabled email verification for new registrations.
New accounts must verify their email. If you don't see the email, check your spam folder.

Hopefully this slows down the spammers. If not, I will take it a step further and enable admin approvals for registrations. I don't want to do that. It would be nice for people to get to use the site immediately rather than waiting a few days for approval. Even if they have to verify their email.

This forum is for everyone to enjoy ... except spammers.

[admin]

Unfortunately, there was still spam. I have now set the forum to require admin approvals for registrations.

If you're having trouble getting approved, then send an email to ptrworkmails@gmail.com explaining that you are a real user. Provide the email you're using to register.

[admin]

I have been deleting on average about 100 spammer registrations per day. Just now I deleted another 172 that appeared within the past few days. When I got done, there was already three more. What's going on with the internet?

Is there a plot to use AI and spambots to render traditional forums unreliable and too difficult to maintain? Hopefully not because I'm not giving up and this spam stuff wastes valuable time.

Could it also be that the fake SEO market has reached a crash and there just too many people trying to compete in spam profit.

Whatever the reason, here's the list of spam profiles from today (the 172 before the other 3).

20240401_121030.jpg (448.84 KiB) Viewed 516 times

I do read the list before deleting and make an effort to see if any are real. This takes time and I might accidentally delete a real registration. This is why it's helpful to email me at ptrworkmails@gmail.com when you register to let us know you're real and actually into computer science.

If you registered and were not approved, please email ptrworkmails@gmail.com and let us know.

[admin]

Wow. Another one just as I posted above...

DELETE DELETE DELETE

[admin]

So that last registration was one that I already deleted today less than 20 minutes ago. I gave it the benefit of the doubt and did some research.

Turns out this email has spam on German, Vietnamese, and sites from around the world with no correlation to each other. Of course the spam is promoting a website who paid out of pocket for this "service."

This is the website that is paying for SEO through the abuse of other sites (posted with the URL broken with spaces to prevent them from achieving an actual link here): sz fo - me tall. ru