New rule for restricting member access
 

The last few months there have been 2 incidents where someone would limit access to his personal spoiler forum. We don't favor this kind of behaviour because:

* New members can't see the forum until you explicitly allow them
* You are encouraging DLs since their new DL will be unknown to you
* It doesn't really resolve the underlying issues

These problems that arise from restricted access will only increase when CDZ will grow. Therefore anarres and I decided that restricting access to your personal spoiler forum is not allowed from now on. People who have this option installed are asked to remove this asap.

If you have a problem with someone who is:
* restricting your access to his/her forum
* spamming/trolling/flaming your forum so it becomes onworkable

Please contact anarres or me and we'll resolve the issue.

I'd like to stress that this measure is here only for the personal fora, the ISDG forum will stay restricted of course. Also anarres and me can always decide to [u]allow</u> someone to restrict access to his/her personal forum when there is a valid reason for this.

We hope this will prevent future unrest.

PP

[mischief] wonder who was behind one of those

oh - anyways - sounds like a good rule

I can still ban WildFire right? For good measure
nah - just kidding


For the record: I am not banning anyone - anymore - I ll just lure them in, lock the door and toss away the key instead [evil]

Just like to note that I'm still banned...

Paalikles has set the list back now.

Anyone banning people from their PBEM forum will find themselves subject to an anarchist butchering. ;)

I didn't mean paal's forum

http://www.civ3duelzone.com/forum/up...16220_cmon.JPG
86.26KB

OK, well I just changed the access permissions on that forum to allow everyone.

Any misbehaviour by anyone in someone's PBEM forum and we will let them be banned from that PBEM forum, or maybe from CDZ for a while. Whilst both PP and me hate making rules like this (and banning people), we can't let people ruin someone else's enjoyment of their forum.

Can we pick on abandoned PBEM forums? You know, spamming and stuff?

Just kidding.

It would be swell if one could disallow certain people to visit certain threads, wouldn't it? ;) Not that I don't trust any of my opponents, but taking the security of Civ4 PBEM's into account it would actually be impossible to cheat even when maintaining a log!

(VBulletin perhaps? [mischief])

Dunno if VB does this actually, but will check.

Can we nag Kemal till he makes his forum restricted access - and then he can choose all the non-spambot members for access

This is not how the rules want it to be, but Kemal attracts much more spam than any of us. So I think he should be allowed to restrict access, and not close his forum.

In case he wants to post some stuff. And wants us to spam some comments on his stuff.


You know, the usual procedure

Kemal's forum has the ID 23, I guess most spambot are sent by the Illuminati...

Actually, my forum has been closed again, as it has been for quite some days.

My best guess is that these bots can somehow measure the size of a forum, since my forum is quite big due to lots of pics. When it was closed earlier though, the spambots just appeared somewhere else on the forum.

what about getting one of those picture verification things for new member registration?

Yeah, and then we can do like the fraternities do and show their picture and everyone can vote on it. Meaning we'd probably only accept cute girls, meaning we'd never have a new member ever again...

i dunno we could just allow whomp multiple DL's shove him in a frock and well you get the idea...

I know this sounds odd but could we like stick to the point?

Picture verification would not be possible to add unless we change forum software.

Are the spambots that bad?

[meli]

I think the spambots are less bad than they Spam Fairy itself...

there not that bad just annoying and do give a break inbetween other spam :)

I wasn't talking about pictures of the individuals... [rolleyes] the picture verification I was talking about is where a image of a letter or sumpin' would need to be entered into a text box, but Meli is likely right that the forum would need to be changed.

[rolleyes] I know, I know, but the individuals' pics is a much better idea. [neener]

To actually answer Meli's question, I personally am okay with the occasional spambottage.

Now that my forum is closed again, I suppose we will see a 300% reduction in spambots anyway...

Oh, they've learned to bypass that ages ago.

Dunno if it is possible on CDZ, but would it help/be possible to ban certain IP addresses from registering on the forum?

A list of common spambot IPs is located at http://www.gearhack.com/Articles/FightSpam/ and it is claimed there (as well as on wikipedia) that it can have some good result in fighting common spambots...

At the moment, spambots are really spiralling out of control on CDZ, it seems almost 50% of the spam produced on CDZ is now caused by bots, and we get several new "members" a day that need to be banned by the mods/admins on the same day they register. [sad]

Can you make CDZ a social networking site requiring a recommendation of a current member to register?
That could really help limit the new spam bot rampage

do we really need new people?

all the cool ones are here.

and all the peeps we by mistake havent got on the memeber roster should be invited.


I second RTM's proposal

im not sure- this site would be good to grow a bit- whilst no doubt the people here are top quality it makes us seem like a bunch of arseholes if we force people to be invited, i prefer kemal's idea.

Paal speaks the truth!![doomsol] [cookiem][charge][col][meli][mistfit][rik1][shabba][paal][stapel]
And many more. Make people work to join.

That way I can say I am in an exclusive internet chat group.

WOOT!!

Easy : Just put a question about the Monty Pythons when you want to register here, that will prevent all the bots* from registering and spamming the place. Heck, I can't be blamed of elitism, I don't even know the Monty Pythons ! [crazyeye]


* except the bots which know the Monty Pythons and which can understand a question, or which can type a billion answers or so within a limited amount of time.

[tubs] so I'm not in the elite group :( I'm #9 in <s>spam</s> posts [:p]

Although it's a good suggestion, it's against the spirit of our founding fathers. You know, anarchist butchers, no elitism and such...

On an unrelated note, would it be possible to restrict new members to post new threads until they've posted in a thread first? That'd keep the bots at bay.

So the spambot IP ban-plan is impossible to imlement for CDZ I suppose..? :(

I think you or Meli are our best hope currently at doing something about the spambots, as you two seem to be the only active admins around CDZ these days that have power at a level to actively change things. So you guys are probably the only ones available to answer questions on possibilities for CDZ to help fight this problem.

Oh noes, we're doomed, DOOMED! Well, then you'd have to bump Meli, he's the technical guy. I'm just here for the show ;)
Anyway, this discussion fits nicely into the "what do we want" thread that I tried to revive last week. I have no clue what we can do with snitz, but IP-banning seems like a useful feature.

Far be it from me to bitch about spam, but the ones cluttering up the open thread forum are starting to get annoying...

My quick dive into snitz support forum gave me something for you to work with. Now get to work. Of course by "you", I really mean [meli], and by get to work, I really mean that Meli should have had those mods installed already

I spam therefore I am!

Seriously though, I've been bloody up to me armpits at work at the moment and barely have time to move threads to the SpamCan...

I will (and I mean I will, not a Propain "I'm about to have a baby" I will) get around to implementing some of the stuff the Scandinavian SpamCat mentioned. Today! or tomorrow... you get the gist.

[meli]

You are my hero!

Right you bastards!

Anti-Spam (alledgedly) CAPTCHA crap enabled.

Spent the last hour amending asp files (very scary), pursuading the forum I was THE ADMIN (I love being able to amend the asp that checks if I'm the admin [:p]) and stopping and restarting the damn forum itself.

Apologies to anyone trying to post anything during this time.

Also anyone who wants to try creating a new user and seeing if it works, feel free.

Also any problems with the forums please blame Shabbaman :)

Let's see how the spambots deal with that!

[meli]

[beer1]

Thanks meli!

The spam fairy stops the bad spam entering Spamhappyland.

We should make a movie about it.