Forum Admin Communities

I just added Illinois Forum – Illinois Chat and Discussions to the network. Illinois Forum is a community for Illinois residents to to get together and talk about anything they like. The topics include sports, politics, entertainment and the arts. There is also a general discussion area and a chit chat area to get to know other Illinois residents.

If you’re a resident of Illinois or are planning to visit Illinois then stop by Illinois Forum and chat with other Illinois residents. If you’re not a resident of Illinois you’re still welcome to join in on the general discussions.

Dealing with low life spammers on a daily basis is no fun. If you have a community website or a blog you know that low life spammers make administration harder than it has to be. Sure Akismet and captcha help. They just aren’t effective enough to catch all the spam a low life spammer spews.

I have been tracking and logging spam bots for a while. I classify a bot as a spam bot if it doesn’t follow robots.txt. I just started to track users that use these bots and I log IP, username and email address. What I am going to do is list these users and their information. I will keep the list updated so you can reference it and block these low life spammers. Check back here often to keep up to date with new additions to the low life spammer list.

Here is the low life spammer list. If you want to add to it post a comment on the low life spammer list page and I’ll add it.

The Low Life Spammer list was updated on March 18TH, 2009. New low life spammers added.

I have put 4 domains up for sale. If you are interested in purchasing them contact me.

The domains for sale are:

• justbs.me – This would be a good domain for an off topic or general chat community.
• microsoftforum.me – Would be a good domain for a Microsoft help community.
• newsgroups.nu – You could use this domain for a number of things. Usenet gateway for one.
• windowshelp.me – This domain could also be used as a Microsoft help community.

Contact me with your offer. I will sell all domains in one package or each separately.

Here is a little incite to what a day in the life of a network admin can be. This is from one day last week, but it is typical of most days. My day will start at 4:30AM most mornings and end anywhere form 8:00PM to Midnight. It all depends on how much work I have scheduled or any problems that I find while doing my checks. Read on to see what a typical day is like.

One of the most frustrating jobs for any vBulletin forum admin or moderator is the never ending fight to stop post and PM spam. There are spambots that specifically target vBulletin forums. vBulletin has helped by adding Akismet spam protection, captcha protection, simple question and answer or reCaptcha to help combat post spam. This was effective until the vBulletin captcha was cracked. The Q&A, in my testing also doesn’t seem, to be effective. These are the measure I’ve taken to help combat the fight against spam.

To stop the post spam I use reCaptcha.  It seems to be the most effective against spambots, but, for the low life spammers that still do things manually even reCaptcha doesn’t help. The main purpose of these spammers is to get backlinks to their sites and services. What I did was create a new usergroup called Registered Members. The new group has the same privileges as the default Registered Users group.

Read on to see how to set up the registered users group and the new registered members group permissions to help combat vBulletin forum spam.