I appreciate your thanks.
I understand your spam comments, but I'm not sure you have quite grasped the situation here.
The key error you, and many well-meaning prior commentators have made, is in misunderstanding the role demographics plays in the way modern professional spammers target forums. Your comment about spammers targeting tech forums is revealing, and somewhat naive.
Users here are affluent, very active on the Internet, and much more likely than average to bank online BUT they are often older and LESS technically sophisticated than the average person with equal net access and are naive with respect to online scams. If you've lurked here much, surely you realize how very naive and gullible some of my users are?
By contrast, tech forum users are only average in income but are younger and MUCH more technically sophisticated and much more likely to keep Flash updated and use tools like NoScript on Firefox to protect themselves.
If you were a spammer or link hacker, which target would you select? Affluent and naive, or average and guarded?
That same lack of sophistication affects what tools I can use here. If I ran Linuxforums, I could ask "which distro Volkerding owns?" or "which was is the oldest distro still being developed?" and just about everyone there could answer. But many of the questions I could use here, that would work for both 20 year old single moms with an Intex and 45 year old bond traders with a weekend home in upstate New York . . . can also be handled by Xrumer.
There have been some tools for vB, and I haven't tried them all. I'll readily admit I don't know everything vB can do, especially in this current flavor. (The state of vB documentation, as you probably know, totally sucks!) But the best tool, BadBehavior, only recently became available again for vB. I was hoping to install it the week the tornadoes hit . . . and I haven't had time since.
Still there is another factor.
Traffic here is more than most people -- including Alexa -- realize. And it's up a bunch. (Apparently, some of the spammers do know -- many of the spam attempts lately have been by SEO hired guns.) We have an ENORMOUS number of lurkers. To put it plainly, we (my moderators and I) couldn't handle the posts we'd get if registration here was as easy as possible.
If I open PF up all the way, it would be a lot bigger. But it wouldn't be PF any more, either.
Sincerely
Ben Powell
PS. It's true, I'm paranoid about security. I try to damp it down, and have, somewhat.
Still, I find it discouraging when people offer help without taking the time to understand the situation here. It's sorta like the guy, who last season authoritatively offered detailed and quite pointed suggestions on how I could cut my hosting costs . . . all based on his experience running a forum that handled about 6 or 7% of the traffic PF was handling at that time. I need help in this area, but I've quit asking, because virtually all the the responses I've gotten in the past miss the mark so widely.
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