I'm curious what you do to sort out the spam from the authentic ham or what ever the slang is for valid candidates.
Hi Casey,
It's actually fairly straightforward, most of the time. We've got a mod installed which highlights suspected spammers, by username, e-mail and IP address. Email is the most reliable indicator, and IP address is pretty reliable too. Username less so (as you can see from the attached screenshot).
The recent sudden massive surge in applications are mostly from email addresses with a certain set of patterns; so I can add ban triggers which will automatically reject attempts to register (with an appropriate message). Obviously I can't use that on all of the mail types - we get a lot of spam registrations with gmail.com addresses - but also a lot of valid registrations.... In those cases, I basically rely on the red indicator.
There's a couple of other tricks: One is to look at the username & e-mail address; often they are similar for legit registrations. Or the username is something obviously Lister, engine or possibly occupation related. If it looks like a random collection of characters, or two random words mashed together, that's a warning. If it looks like a name & the mail address looks like a totally different name, that's also a warning - not always accurate though.
Finally, if the e-mail address bounced the "welcome" message for any reason (doesn't exist, has spam controls on it, is full), then the user is rejected. Life's too short to go chasing after people who make it hard to get in touch.
Occasionally - just occasionally - a spammer makes it through all the checks unscathed, and then it's a retrospective ban & cleanup time
You've all seen that a couple of times...
Anyway - my train is about to arrive at my destination, so it's time to go....
Cheers,
Ade.
