Please ban seghbfh!!!

I am sooooo sick of these spam threads. Could the mods please ditch this loser?

I second this! there have been at least 10 in the last several days. Seems to be links to sporting games. Really annoying.

They just make a new username and come back. This has been every weekend for months now with a different username, same type of content.

Can we temporarily ban new accounts until they lose interest?

I don’t think COTH has the technical know-how to ban these posters. Any more than it has the capability to fix all the site’s technical problems. It keeps asking us to delete cookies, block ads, etc., as if it were OUR technical problems.

It’s not. It’s COTH, and its new website.

They can ban users, which they do, frequently and I am thankful they do because the spammers are annoying.
What they can not do is guess the next ID of the spammers.

It kinda is a bit your technical problem since most of us are not experiencing the same things you are. Thats why many of us keep asking you to try things… what “fixes” or alters the behavior to know then where to look for the problem.

Software like this is complex and a combination of out-of-the box software (vBulletin) along with customizations from COTH. It would not be unusual that a third party “customization” uncovered a “bug” in OOB software (vBulletin).

I would pay money to make them go away - how about charging a nominal fee to get a user name for new people? That would leave the old timers alone and discourage bots and kids on vacation

Obviously someone left the crystal ball at home! :lol: :lol: :lol:

Very often, technical issues do originate with the end user or their browser or computer and not with a website or its software. Especially when the issue is only affecting a single user or a few users. Reboot your computer, restart your program, clear your cookies, scan for malware, etc are all legitimate troubleshooting steps and often do resolve issues.

I’ve moderated many bulletin boards in the past. It’s almost impossible to keep the spammers out entirely without also blocking new legitimate users. You can add steps, questions, or captchas to the registration process and they’ll figure them out. You can IP ban, and they’ll come back via a proxy server. They are constantly changing and evolving their methods to stay ahead of technology that might stop them. On one board I would research each new user before approving them, searching on email address and username and other registration info to try to tie the account to an actual human. But on a board of this size without full time mods that’s highly impractical, and not all people have a large, interconnected internet footprint.

Would you say these are spam bots? All the links, not that I clicked on them, appear to be sports Videos.

It’s likely due to the random way the titles appear to be generated from other text, and the content being just a list of links (which you are right to not click on). They may or may not actually be sports videos, as usually they list content that is in high demand in order to get people to click. The links may go to a virus, malware, or a phishing site that tries to get your info.

Sometimes they have actual people creating the profiles in order to bypass the site security features for new accounts. Sometimes they even manage to automate that. On a site like this they could probably program a bot to recognize and answer the security questions since they draw from a limited pool.