System: New Members

[proffrink]

Important stuff in bold.

 

Message and content allowances for new accounts

Following a large recent spam wave (where numerous bot accounts circumvented our captcha and anti-flood restrictions by posting as legitimate sign-ups), steps need to be taken to limit the amount of spam that a single account can conduct before being found and closed down. Currently there are few restrictions on how many messages you can send as a new member.

 

As a new member, you can have up to 250 total conversations with 8 total recipients in each.  Meaning that - with the right script - you could send as many as 2,000 notifications every 15 minutes to users of the forums. This happened last night with approximately 50 new accounts, so you can imagine it was putting quite a strain on the webserver (not to mention the illicit spam being sent out to legitimate forum users).

 

As of last night (06/12/20): when signing up you will only be able to have a total of 10 conversations with up to 4 recipients in each as well as only being able to make 10 posts or comments a day. After one week this restriction will automatically lift. If you are reading this post as an existing member who signed up before last night, your account will not be affected by this change (even if you only signed up two days ago).

 

We do not wish to discourage new sign-ups by not allowing them to communicate with sellers on the Classifieds (our main source of new members) or preventing them from participating in discourse at all. This restriction is only present to restrict the amount of spam that might flood the website at one time so that moderators have a chance to react and shut it down.

 

Increased bot protection

A simple tweak to our 'security level' in Cloudflare* means that you may be presented with an access challenge (basically another captcha) to check that you aren't a bot. Although we already use invisible reCAPTCHA on our sign-up form, don't be surprised to see this new Cloudflare captcha for a few days as it learns to 'trust' your device/browser (for most of you, you'll see nothing).

 

Thanks.

 

*a service that this website uses to mitigate Denial of Service attacks and to save data by caching certain forum pages

[ukpred1]

Why can i not post anything in clasiffieds  or make an offer on anything?

 

[proffrink]

Send me a PM with a screenshot of your problem if possible and I'll check for you. Thanks!