Spam Posts

[Scooter]

A few spam posts are getting through, because of the user-initiated registration process. This is happening because actual humans in countries such as Cambodia and India are circumventing the registration system, and then trying to make posts that seem legitimate ("I'm a real tree planter and chain saw operator") then adding spam links at the bottom of the posts. I'm trying to erase them as I see them, although since I'm working in an area right now without much cell/internet, I sometimes don't see them for a few days.

More importantly, when I see these posts, I'm banning IP ranges in a format such as 106.187.*.* once I know that a specific IP range is causing problems.

There are only 65536 possible combinations of IP's in the X.X.*.* format, so eventually I'll have wiped out a lot of the problem IP ranges. I've probably banned about a hundred swaths so far, all from outside Canada. It would be a lot easier if I could just ban IP's from outside of Canada, although that would cause some problems for people working in Australia/Scotland, and could still be circumvented by spam-farm employees with VPN access.

[Scooter]

I've also just turned off user registration until mid-August. I don't have enough time right now to log in here more than once every three or four days, so I can't monitor problems closely enough.