The Blacklist Refugees » Admin Notes

Honey West · 1/23/2019 3:08 am

Greetings from your Admin! From time to time, I will post admin announcements here. Luckily, there is very little need.

However, I wanted to let members know that I periodically review the User List. Sometimes I find questionable users who are obviously spam or point to questionable websites. These are deleted. Other users are not so obvious, but I do delete some of them, too.

If you are ever deleted, and you feel it was in error, please feel free to send me a private message. I would also encourage members who have never posted to maybe send me a message, too, just to let me know you are a real user and not a bot. Boardhost is pretty good at stopping bots, but it doesn’t hurt to let the Admin know, too, so I don’t accidentally delete you.

I hope you enjoy visiting our site. We do our best to keep things fun!

Tuxie400 · 1/23/2019 9:29 am

I've seen a couple lately that I thought were bots or not really BL fans. Thanks, Honey West!

Eastcoast · 1/23/2019 11:40 am

Thank you HW! We needed that. Lol

Honey West · 1/23/2019 3:55 pm

I had some time to kill yesterday while on jury duty.

Honey West · 1/31/2019 4:00 pm

Important message for Members!

I am going to go ahead and purge the member list of people who have never posted a message. This will be to clean out possible bots and other things that could be using the board.

If you have posted at least one message you will be okay.
If you wish to stay, please post something.
We will also go back to the admins approving new members before full site privileges are granted.

Nothing bad, just trying to stay ahead of the bad bots.

Tatiana · 1/31/2019 4:26 pm

Honey West - THANK YOU SO MUCH!

Last edited by Tatiana (1/31/2019 4:28 pm)

Eastcoast · 1/31/2019 11:47 pm

Honey West, this is a great idea! Thank you!

Tuxie400 · 2/01/2019 10:37 am

There were a large number who registered but never posted!

Honey West · 2/01/2019 3:43 pm

Yes, they have been purged.

Honey West · 2/22/2019 4:00 pm

Yes, the board is set to automatically delete people who never post. One post and you're in, however.

Tatiana · 2/22/2019 4:31 pm

Thank you Honey West!
Yes, I noticed the original board is no longer in existence. It makes me so sad because there was some absolutely brilliant posts and Chompstick's compilations were priceless! What wit and creativity!

Eastcoast · 2/26/2019 1:20 am

Honey West wrote:
Yes, they have been purged.

I cannot read the word Purge anymore without thinking of Fiona.

Honey West · 4/30/2019 12:38 pm

Dear Members, I have changed the way new members join us in that we admins/mods now need to approve people. We've been getting a lot of spam email addresses trying to join lately, so we've started doing that. I have also recently pruned a lot of members who either never posted anything or had odd-sounding posts when they did (like auto-generated or something). So if you were an old member who wonders where you went, drop me a line and tell me so we can reinstate you.
Thank you,
Honey West, Admin

Honey West · 6/03/2019 2:47 pm

Been battling the spambots a lot lately! I still don't know why this board always seems to have between 5 and 14 "guests" online all the time. I am considering adding questions to be answered by people trying to join. I think I can do three questions. But I can't do anything about those pesky "guests" because they don't actually show up anywhere that I can nuke 'em.?

Tatiana · 6/03/2019 3:37 pm

Honey West, I was going to PM. They've ALL been spambots! Not one of their extensions, what comes after @, is at all recognizable.

Honey West · 6/03/2019 5:19 pm

I had a scary thing earlier, Tatiana. I normally go and research the URL of the prospective member and one this morning took me directly to a screen that said "Congratulations, your new website has been created and is ready to go!" I immediately deleted my history and cookies and rebooted my system in case I had picked up anything nasty in the cookies. Normally I just get search results, but this one took me to a live page of some sort. Ugh, ewww, phttt! I have Malwarebytes installed so I should be okay. I thought I had emailed Boardhost support about the "guests", but maybe I just thought I did it. I'll try them again. I'm sure they are bot-related.

Tatiana · 6/03/2019 9:42 pm

Oh wow, Honey West, that is terrible !
I delete anything that's has odd extensions. If it's gmail, hotmail, etc, no problems. Otherwise, we're such a small group and the show is probably into it's last season I don't do much looking into the identity.

Honey West · 6/03/2019 11:45 pm

We’ve had a lot of .ru domain emails try to join lately. Normally I copy the address into a google search and see if the address appears on known spambot lists. They usually do. So I delete and ban them. Today I was searching a domain name and accidentally got taken to the website. Ugh! I’ll be more careful from now on. Spambots target little groups like ours, unfortunately. I like tracking these things down and destroying them. Heheheheh!

Tuxie400 · 6/04/2019 1:52 pm

How do the spambots target us? What is the danger. I know this board registers as not secure with my AVG protection.

Honey West · 6/04/2019 2:24 pm

Apparently spambots target most boards like ours. Most are fended off by the hosting company's software, but mostly they try to join with fake or spoofed email addresses. We have cut out most of them by requiring at least one post be made on the board. A spambot typically never posts anything. Then we started seeing odd messages like the one who asked about antennas and a couple of others. So I started looking them up and found them listed on spambot monitoring sites. I do a little further research on the ones who don't show up on those lists. Luckily there are only about two or three per month. Recently, I decided to change the joining requirement so that admins/moderators have to approve new members, instead of anyone who wanted to being able to join. In the beginning Tabasko had it set that way to make it easier for people to migrate from the old board. So we have drastically reduced the opportunities for bad players to get on here. I can also require potential new members to answer some security questions, but I haven't needed to do that yet. Still, unregistered guests can look at our board without joining, they just can't post. If we went for a paid board we could get a totally closed site. But, as it is, our board is not registered on the Boardhost public lookup list.
I get the not secure notice, too. I also get it on other websites that I know aren't a problem. It's just got something to do with the site's security certificates not meeting some of the most recent security requirements. Since we don't sell anything or deal with anything that requires that level of security, our site will have that Not Secure warning pop up in the browser address window. At least that's what I was told.

We do show up if somebody searches for The Blacklist using Google or any of the other search engines. But I don't think we are very high on the search lists.

Last edited by Honey West (6/04/2019 2:27 pm)