ChowChow.org Forum Spam & New Account Registration

[chowadmin]

Hello everyone,

Lately there has been a huge spike in spam bots and spammers attempting to spam our forum. On average about 10 new spam accounts are created each day. I have been manually deleting them and filtering them out. However they do not seem to be going away. I'm not sure what the cause of the spike is, but hopefully the phpBB community is experiencing a similar problem and is working on a solution in the next update to the forum software.

To help curb the problem and hopefully discourage spammers, I have changed the new user registrations from user approval via email to require admin approval. This means I'll get an email for every account creation and I have to examine it and approve or delete the account accordingly.

Because of this, real legitimate accounts might take a little while to become activated and allowed to post on our forums. The reason is because I'm not always available at a computer. If your new account has been deleted by me (because your registration info looked like a spammer) or you are awaiting activation, you can email me at chowadmin@chowchow.org with your account information to speed things along.

Thank you for your patience and understanding.

[chowadmin]

Status Update
After some adjustments to the registration form spam questions it appears that the spam bots have become challenged and are unable to register, while allowing real legitimate users to still register. I've updated the registration process to allow users to activate themselves via email confirmation link.

Pruning Users
To help clean up our member list and database of spammers I am going through and deleting all users that have not been active in over 1 year and have 0 posts. I'm trying to filter out real accounts, however I will not catch all of them, so if you've been a member for over a year, have no posts, and have not logged in - in over a year, then your account might be deleted. I apologize. Simply create a new account to participate in the ChowChow.org forums.

Thank you for your patience and understanding. Hope everyone and all the Chow Chows had a wonderful holiday and new year!

[chowadmin]

After some extensive filtering and cleaning up, over 10,000 spam and inactive accounts have been removed from the ChowChow.org forum. Bringing the total active accounts down to 3880, most with at least 1 or more posts since starting the forum in 2005.

[cherriemater]

WOW!!! Joe, Marti, Leo and Max say GOOD JOB!!! Double purple kisses, four hands and eight paws are clapping for your hard work!!!