 Recently the PureMVC Forums have come under heavier siege than ever before. Ironically, it appears that the act of upgrading our forum software to the latest version resulted in making it easier than ever for spambots to signup. Many of you will recall that earlier this year, when spammers first began to show heavy interest in our forums, I had to turn off automatic registration and make all signups have to be approved. This added a lot of thankless manual labor to my life, but it restored the quality of the forums, and no more spam showed up. The big problem was that I still had to have a way to tell if you were a spammer or not. Just a valid email address and username isn't enough. So I used the only filter I could trust at the time, which was Linked-in, a professional social network that most everyone in this industry has an account on. I added a huge shouting ALL CAPS message to the top of the Terms and Conditions, explaining that you needed to contact me from Linked-in if you wanted me to approve your account. Of course 99% of people ignored the terms and never emailed from Linked-in. So I had to continually troll through the pending signups, searching the web for your email addresses or usernames, to see if they were listed with various spammer registries. I banned the spammers, approved the folks I could determine were real developers, and sent email to the rest reminding them to contact me from Linked-in. Then after a few weeks, I had to go back and see who I'd notified that hadn't yet contacted me and remove their pending signups. Phew, are you tired yet? I just thought I was until this latest wave of bots hit. Currently, I'm getting about 50 spambot signups a day. No way am I going to sort through that rubbish. I just won't. They zigged, so I've gotta zag.
The Solution:
I've disabled forum registration, and all signups must go through Futurescale's Contact Wizard. If you need an account, go there and simply follow the instructions to 'Request Access to Futurescale-operated forums'. You do NOT have to signup again if you already have an account. And if you do have an account but when you go to the forums you get a message saying you're banned due to spam, it is probably an overly broad IP address filter. If this happens, just send me a 'General Comment' with your info through the Contact Wizard. It will show me your IP address automatically, and I can fix the filter. On a technical note, this is a multi-purpose wizard built using Futurescale's Pinball Wizard Framework, which will go into beta soon (you can also sign up for the beta in the Contact Wizard). The Wizard already handles quite a few different sequences for contacting our company. Adding the support for a forum signup path through the wizard took about 3 hours to complete including the server support. It's built on PureMVC Standard Version and Adobe Flex, but you don't need to know PureMVC at all in order to use it. |
