A breath of fresh air

Hello everyone, I just wanted to give everyone a brief update on our recent spam user purge. I used a plugin that flagged every user account for deletion that hasn’t been used to write posts or comments, but there was no way to automatically exclude users that have only posted in the forum from this list. So I went through every forum post to look for users that have commented in the forum, checked their community page for comments, and if none, I plucked it out of the deletion list. Thus, anyone who has used their account in the forum (but not for comments on posts) has had their account saved. There were also some recent new users whose names I recognized, and they were also protected from deletion. A few clicks later, and over 700 spam accounts clogging up the system were deleted.
Now our blog’s community page is a breath of fresh air. Take a look, find yourself in it and how you appear to others visiting the site. For those who are not familiar with this yet, registered users have community pages that they can use to write a bit about themselves, flag favorite posts, link to facebook (or Google+) profiles, and put up pictures. Registered users also get a chance to win community contests – and there will be another one of these soon.
And from the last couple weeks, I have not seen any new spam users show up, so I think the new registration confirmation process is working. It is nice to actually see the accounts of users on this site! Fantastic.

2 comments

  1. Karl,
    The web is abuzz with ‘news’ of the efforts of a group of hackers by the name of ‘Anonymous’ have targeted ag biotech with ‘hacktivism’. Any chance these efforts included attacks on your site, that required moving to another server?

  2. I read about that. Unless they somehow managed to make Dreamhost’s web service altogether crappy but functional, then most likely not.
    I am fairly confident that hackers who know the ins and outs and subtle tricks of computer code can manage to find out About page and learn that Biofortified != Monsanto.
    (For those not familiar with the term, != means Not Equal To)

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