NEW MEMBERS vs SPAMMERS

I apologies if you are seeking membership with the Grasshopper Forums and have been declined in recent days. Please try again but make sure you include sensible information about yourself. The more you provide the easier it is for me and others to distinguish you as a valued member.

This evening alone I have had 40 new membership applications only 1 of which I have accepted. The majority of those were easily identifiable as spammers. There were about 5 that could go either way, but I erred on the side of caution and declined them as we are being inundated with a very persistent group of spammers as of late.

New members please try again..... spammers you can just go and boil your circuit boards in a vat of Dhaka's finest curry

Replies to This Discussion

Permalink Reply by Danny Boyes on October 28, 2013 at 11:31am

I don't - remember I don't work for McNeel.

Scott does but it is West Coast time zone USA. So there will be a lag in European Reporting Issues and US Results.

If you post a discussion on the matter you might get faster results as I can deal with it. If you do both then you are guaranteed a victory :)

Permalink Reply by djordje on October 28, 2013 at 11:34am

Hm, opening a discussion may cause flooding, as some users might open new topic each time a spammer appears.
Ok, I will send you Private messages.

Permalink Reply by Danny Boyes on October 28, 2013 at 12:13pm

does that really matter? at the rate that new discussions get posted on here it would soon fall off the end of the list.

There are users who have left (closed their account) as a result of the spammers. It seems that they are preyed upon because they joined recently and are close to the spammer in the members list. If they would just report it by any means then It can be dealt with.

Personally I think we have done pretty well up 'til now.

26,000+ active members

221 left by choice (Less than 1%)

535 suspended (2%)

And just recently around 90% per day are declined as obvious spammers

It's just a shame about the 1% :(

Permalink Reply by David Rutten on October 28, 2013 at 12:17pm

It's just a shame about the 1%

I'm not concerned about the very rich....

David Rutten

david@mcneel.com

Seattle, WA

Permalink Reply by Michael Pryor on October 29, 2013 at 11:40am

535? that's a lot of lines :)

Permalink Reply by Sridevi Koonath on October 25, 2013 at 12:19am

Er...there is always Rhino evaluation for the spammers.

Permalink Reply by Danny Boyes on October 25, 2013 at 6:45am

Yeah... but would they. :)

I think if I was sat in an internet cafe in Lahore, Dhaka or the other favorite at the moment Manila spamming social networks, I don't think I would go to the trouble of downloading Rhino to install Grasshopper just so I can tell people to go Watch The Walking Dead.

Permalink Reply by Sridevi Koonath on October 25, 2013 at 7:14am

Not even if you were getting paid/rewarded in some way, for doing it?

Permalink Reply by Umar Jamshaid on October 27, 2013 at 6:14am

why would anyone associate spam with Lahore or a similar city-dhaka?

Permalink Reply by Danny Boyes on October 28, 2013 at 4:23am

I'm sorry Umar,

I don't mean to be rude about the the city you live in.

The majority of the spammers which I am dealing with at the moment hail from those two cities. During the membership application we have access to their IP address. Quite often the same IP address has five or six applications in one go, I could understand this if it was a university or something similar but not the way they are doing it. The next highest number come from the Philippines

The majority of spammers are setting up Profiles with attractive women (sometimes men) as their photo, clearly a made up name, saying they attend a US college of some sort and have a location as somewhere in the USA, but their IP address says different.

Once they get accepted they start posting links to watch tv streamed online, for what reason I'm not sure, but someone has suggested its to do with a new Copyright Act that websites can be shut down if they contain links to copyrighted material.

The ones that get through mostly get suspended within an hour of posting, the ones who get missed are the craftier ones who get accepted to groups and then start spamming the members of those groups, usually the ones who accept Email notifications for everything. These tend to go longer without being suspended because anyone can set up a group but only a few can suspend people for spam.

Thanks for taking an interest, if you would prefer you can PM me with any spam related matters.

Danny

Permalink Reply by Danny Boyes on October 28, 2013 at 4:32am

Case in point, just after I posted the above reply I had a number of applicants similar to this: