Member List

[douglas m scott]

After opening Elements Village and checking out the new posts, not very many, and not wanting to get up and do house work right now I decided to check out the (Member List) which I had never done. I clicked through the first 5 pages and decided to fastforward to the last page and on this page there were several Member Listings with the same name [-'young'-]. I started clicking on the previous page and then the previous page until I came to the end of the listings for [-'young'-]. 155 listings . I thought maybe some company had purchased all of them to give away as a promotional item. Not so. PORNO SITES. Does Management know about this?

doug

[Wendy]

Hi doug ...

Earlier this year there was a mass spammer about ... I think that it maube connected ... but I have passed a message on about it.

Thanks for letting us know :)

Wendy

[ricklepage]

After opening Elements Village and checking out the new posts, not very many, and not wanting to get up and do house work right now I decided to check out the (Member List) which I had never done. I clicked through the first 5 pages and decided to fastforward to the last page and on this page there were several Member Listings with the same name [-'young'-]. I started clicking on the previous page and then the previous page until I came to the end of the listings for [-'young'-]. 155 listings . I thought maybe some company had purchased all of them to give away as a promotional item. Not so. PORNO SITES. Does Management know about this?

<sigh>

Yes, Doug - we (I never like to think of my self as Management, especially with a capital 'M" :)) know about the problems with the member lists. This is a known issue with the forum software we're using, and, unless we increase the registration process to be much more stringent (and more convoluted to users), we'll get this type of crud in the member lists. We are looking into those 'word tests' (called Captcha) that many sites are now using in an attempt to stop automated user creation.

I actually spent about three hours the other day weeding spam users from the member list, but it's not an easy process - you have to do it one user at a time.

The upside is that very few spammers, out of the thousands who create bogus IDs, spam us here.

I would like to move to a different forum package at some point, but that's a pretty distressing process for users: in general, people don't like change, and the forum software we have seems to be ok for the majority of our members.

I'm all for listening to ideas people might have for improving things, however.

Rick