Cardboard Christmas

The good news is that Cardboard Christmas is already a popular site. The bad news is that people who want to scam you or abuse our sites to sell illicit stuff have already begun their attacks. So far I've killed about 30 spams before they ever got posted but three got through. I have just reset the board so that when new people sign up, their first message has to be approved before it even shows up on the site. My apologies for this hassle. Once I see that your post has legitimate content (usually within a few hours), I'll reset you to a full registered member so you don't have to go through this again.

As an alternative to having to wait to see your posts online, you could e-mail me with your screen name and telling me enough about yourself so I know you're serious about contributing to the forum. Of course if your first post OR your e-mail to me says something like "This is a really cool forum. I can't wait to participate so I can tell you all about a cool money-making scheme I found on the internet," you should not expect a reply.

In case you think I might be overreacting, I just came across an unmoderated "Christmas" web page (which shall remain nameless) that has about an 800-to-one spam-to-Christmas-Content ratio. Why these people are still paying to keep the site online, I have no idea.

Everyone who was already signed up as of 12:01AM E.S.T. Nov. 7, 2011 is already approved to post, so this won't affect you. But it will affect anyone who signs up from now on. Please be patient as I try to work out a balance between "user-friendly" and "scammer-friendly"

- Paul

Whatever you have to do to keep the site and forum up is fine with me. I wish I had more interesting things to contribute!

Thanks, Ruthann. I've cut out about twelve more would-be spammers before their messages got through since I upgraded the security.

But Maria said she had trouble posting something, which is NOT a good thing. We'll see.

Hi Paul, it seems to have been just a bad connection on my end.

Just cut out another spam post before it was posted, deleted 7 fake signups before they posted. I can see why Papa Ted got tired of the spammers, and I have a LOT more security than his web server offered on their "visitors' book" pages.

The good news is that we must be popping up in a lot of search engines for these low-lifes to consider us worth hacking.

So far we have about a 5-to-1 would-be-spammers to actual sign-up ratio. But at the moment I seem to be able to keep the spammers from getting anything actually posted. I've also been able to verify several legitimate users and upgraded them before they actually posted anything, so there hopefully hasn't been too much inconvenience. In the meantime, there's a wealth of ideas from the new people. Great to have you all aboard!

I am now killing dozens of spammers a day, so I'm going to try a new tack - instead of letting the software approve new members, signups will be approved by e-mail TO ME on a case-by-case basis. This means I'm signing up for 30 - 60 more spams a day in my e-mail, but I should be able to reject them on with a single keystroke instead of several. We'll see.

We all appreciate your hard work. As one of the editors at EverythingCroton, we get about 30 spams a day (they're moderated and don't go up without approval consensus). But that means you have to look at them all--and that IS work...so again we appreciate all you do because we go through the same thing. It's what happens when your site gets popular these days.