gmail e-mail addresses *now unbanned*

Post by **Neil** » Wed Nov 21, 2007 12:31 am

Tonight I have decided to ban all gmail e-mail addresses from using my forums. The number of bogus account creation attempts using gmail addresses has become too much of a pain.

If there is a strong enough demand, I may consider re-instating the domain.

Cheers,

Neil.

KSMarksPsych · Post by **KSMarksPsych** » Wed Nov 21, 2007 12:20 pm

Just had to make sure I could still post

I use a gmail address and I was worried that I wouldn't be able to post at all.

Post by **Neil** » Wed Nov 21, 2007 7:43 pm

Hi,

Glad to see existing gmail users are unaffected.

I guess I should have said all new accounts created with gmail addresses will be banned automatically.

Cheers,

Neil.

povaddict · Post by **povaddict** » Wed Dec 12, 2007 5:11 am

It sounds like you seriously need a captcha.

Post by **Neil** » Wed Dec 12, 2007 7:40 pm

When registering users are asked to enter the characters from a captcha.

So either there's a sad bunch of humans attempting to register at phpBB forums or the spam bots are able to interpret the phpBB captchas.

This one reason why I now vet each application to be a member. Any accounts that appear to be for spam purposes are deleted and their domains banned.

In the case of GMail, the number of bogus accounts was getting to much to manage, so I deciced to ban the entire GMail domain.

Guess I may need a better captcha!

Cheers,

Neil.

povaddict · Post by **povaddict** » Wed Dec 12, 2007 7:53 pm

Neil wrote:When registering users are asked to enter the characters from a captcha.

AFAIK, phpBB2 captcha has been long broken...

Post by **Neil** » Wed Dec 12, 2007 9:52 pm

Hi,

I had suspected this for a while, but have now done something about it.

You are right, the captcha has been broken for sometime.

I have now installed a new one, which will hopefully stop the spam.

I'll unban GMail to see how it goes.

Cheers,

Neil.

povaddict · Post by **povaddict** » Wed Dec 12, 2007 10:10 pm

Neil wrote:I have now installed a new one, which will hopefully stop the spam.

It doesn't even matter if the new one isn't too good. Spam software will notice it's phpbb2 and attempt to crack the default captcha, which won't work. Even if it's easy to crack the new captcha, they don't have software to do it

Post by **Neil** » Tue Jan 01, 2008 6:18 pm

I'd like to report that the number of bogus accounts has plummetted to zero since installing the new captcha!

MundayWeb.com

gmail e-mail addresses now unbanned

gmail e-mail addresses now unbanned