Membership should be only by Admin/Mod review

[Count Blacktron]

I've just been hit by a disturbing series of porn images while my 4 year old nephew is in the room. I am mad as Megablocks. New member serialretu just uploaded porn to the General LEGO section a few minutes ago. Is there any chance you guys can do something smart like moderating user applications for membership to see if they are for real? Some kind of post filter that keeps suspicious or dirty link/keywords out would be really much better.

[Sir Kohran]

I've just been hit by a disturbing series of porn images while my 4 year old nephew is in the room.

That's absolutely disgraceful Did your nephew actually see anything of that crap? I hope he didn't...I saw some similar 'images' a few months ago and I haven't really gotten over how sick it was. EDIT: I just found the user you were referring to...all I can say is that I hope your nephew didn't see... :evil:

I agree with everything you've said. We need to purge this filth and make the board clean again, like it used to be.

[SavaTheAggie]

Unfortunately, many of the spammers who post these types of posts have nothing in their profile that would flag them as spammers. This latest one had a suspicious URL in their website address but it wasn't obviously adult in nature, though I did not click on it (no need, since I already knew he was a spammer).

So while moderating memberships would cut down on this type of thing, it would not prevent it. All a member has to do is keep a very simple profile without anything to flag them as being a spammer and we would approve them. We can't be mind readers, we have no way of filtering intent.

We can add more filters to our forum software to change 'bad' words, but as far as images and links, that's something entirely different. The forum software cannot interpret what a picture is, to it and your home computer, its just a series of bits.

Of course I have to wonder why you clicked on a forum title called "Hot and Hard. Best of free adult video 4" and expected not to see something inappropriate.

--Tony

[Sir Kohran]

Unfortunately, many of the spammers who post these types of posts have nothing in their profile that would flag them as spammers. This latest one had a suspicious URL in their website address but it wasn't obviously adult in nature, though I did not click on it (no need, since I already knew he was a spammer).

So while moderating memberships would cut down on this type of thing, it would not prevent it. All a member has to do is keep a very simple profile without anything to flag them as being a spammer and we would approve them. We can't be mind readers, we have no way of filtering intent.

We can add more filters to our forum software to change 'bad' words, but as far as images and links, that's something entirely different. The forum software cannot interpret what a picture is, to it and your home computer, its just a series of bits.

This is frustrating - I was just looking through the newest members and I found a user called 'Kologinma'. Under their interests they had Warcraft - sounds like an average Castle fan. But when you look at the pictures they're anything but. So yes, identifying spammers/sexual freaks is difficult.

[Blue Head]

To war my friends. The spammers will fall to our rain of terror! Why must these IDIOTS do things like this?! THere has to be a way to stop this madness!

[Athos]

There is. Stop clicking on the links... Unless something is clearly a MOC (brickshelf/flicker/etc) or is from someone who I recognize, I don't click.

Steve

[wunztwice]

There is. Stop clicking on the links... Unless something is clearly a MOC (brickshelf/flicker/etc) or is from someone who I recognize, I don't click.

Steve

I agree, this is my philosophy. Don't get me wrong, I hate spamming, especially with content as despicable as this, but there are ways to safe-guard yourself.

As to membership, we take pride here in that our sign-on process is not altogether terribly complicated, as stated in several other threads. We try to encourage members in this fashion, unlike some places like FBTB, and others, where it is much harder to get an account.

[Bluesecrets]

I agree, don't click.

If you find one, then pm a gm as they have asked many a times.
(They have asked for pm's, not new threads and posts, more than a few times.)

One message board I have been apart of has a "don't feed the trolls" philosophy. Don't reply. Don't post. Just let them be until they are deleted. This seems to work quite well.

Unfortunately spammers exist. Unfortunately short of imposing a much tougher registration process which will be extremely time consuming for the gm's, there isn't much to be done.

So in two brief words...

Don't click...

[Spongey]

Not clicking is a good philosophy. However, what's to be done if someone posts a thumbnail image on the site itself. This can even occur in previously created, castle-related threads, so there is no way to tell. I believe that a stricter membership process is a good idea.

[DARKspawn]

The problem with PMs is that they can be very slow to actually leave your outbox on this site, unless I'm missing something...

But not feeding the Trolls is a good philosophy

[Emp.Justinian]

Sometimes spammers "disguise" their porno as something else. On recent user disguised his as a link to toyota, so it can be hard to tell. And while feeding the trolls is a bad idea, sometimes natural curiosity gets the better of you and you don't think first.

In short I would advicat some sort of filtering device.

God's speed

Emp.Justinian

[SavaTheAggie]

Again, we can't filter non-text content, and we can't even filter text content aside from swapping out bad words. And even that doesn't work well because alot of words contain bad words.

We were reminded in the old chat of this when we activated the vulgarity filter and could not talk about Classic-Castle.

The images these spammers put in their posts are not even connected to the Classic-Castle website. They just post a link to those images and YOUR computer goes to the address and downloads the picture, saving it in your cache. I've tried putting in a filter to delete what is placed between the img anchors, but it doesn't work. The vulgarity filter only filters the words displayed, not the actual raw post.

And again, a stricter membership process will NOT prevent all spam. As it is our forum software stops spammers that are bots, but real people, like those who post the porn images, could/would get through all of it because we have no concrete way of knowing intent.

--Tony

[LEGOFREAK]

Sometimes spammers "disguise" their porno as something else. On recent user disguised his as a link to toyota, so it can be hard to tell.

Once when I first got online, I found a site that had a bunch of warcraft 2 links - you know to maps that folks had created?
Most of the links were good, but there were a few that led to porn site, and one that led to a satanists site. IN this case, someone had hacked into the links page and changed several of the links to these wicked sites. Not the same thing as is going on here of course..

I suppose the motto of this post is this:
Don't feed the trolls...

No wait.. it's don't have your kids look at anything until you have looked at it first! (um, and then decide its appropriate for them to look at. )

[Spongey]

And again, a stricter membership process will NOT prevent all spam. As it is our forum software stops spammers that are bots, but real people, like those who post the porn images, could/would get through all of it because we have no concrete way of knowing intent.

If we had some sort of filtering system, most pornographers would give up. They wouldn't waste their time waiting to gain membership if there are other sites so much easier to spam out there. Something like a simple LEGO related question could be implemented as part of the membership process. As I said before, with all of the sights with no security out there, a lot of spammers will be deterred by the resistance we put up.

[Anubisconq]

Something like a simple LEGO related question could be implemented as part of the membership process. As I said before, with all of the sights with no security out there, a lot of spammers will be deterred by the resistance we put up.

Here here!