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[Emma]

This has also been posted in the Rules section.   If any one wishes to comment, please do so here.

In the last few weeks there has been an influx of applications for membership at AdventTalk, with prospective names that are essentially gibberish.

The Admin team have decided that any name that appears to be a meaningless collection of letters will not be permitted.

Such applications will be deleted without response or explanation.

If you have any particular reason for choosing such a user name, you are free to discuss its use with the Admin team.

Emma
Moderator

[GrandmaNettie]

Emma, I have been noticing a huge daily influx of jibberish names on BlackSDA.com, as well.  It is my understanding that these are usually robot-driven spam attempts.  I'm surprised you are getting them here on Adventtalk because, while I don't remember if the safeguard was in place here when I registered here back in early 2008, I was told that new members must copy a picture of a group of letters in order to submit a request for membership.  That step usually keeps these spam attempts from being successful.

I suppose it is possible that some clever person has created a program to defeat that safeguard.

GrandmaNettie

[Johann]

A number of spam names have been deleted, since we do  not want any non-persons in here. If any guest feels that his/her application for membership has not been honored, then we ask that you make a new application. However, we request that you do use a username which can easily be read and pronounced in English.

[Johann]

Here is the name of the latest applicant: "figLiawiptbat"  - and the application has been deleted.

[Emma]

Grandma Nettie's suggestion is a good one, Johann - maybe our busy technical person could look at inserting a word to be copied when
submitting an application.

Some of the email addresses of the applicants have been rather off beat as well.

[Johann]

Is this possible now, or do we have to wait for an upgrade?

[Emma]

I think we would need to ask the IT expert that one.

[Daryl Fawcett]

As it is very easy to fix, your IT expert should be able to easily and quickly enhance that feature.

[calvin]

Not so easy to fix.  The spammer have good IT folks too.  It is a cat-and-mouse games folks.  The softare application suppliers plug the holes and strengthen security, then the spammers find other ways to exploit the systems.  Spammers have the upper hand for now. 

The best you can do is have some semi-manual or manual validation process for new members as you are doing now until the application folks catch up.

[Johann]

Thank you for that information, Calvin. Then we know what to do for now.