Membership numbers

[Justme]

Goo job, thanks Dan! Consists my grand prize of a "MK best tickets in the house pre-booking script"?

 

[Fieneke2]

Perhaps it has something to do with Spam-Bots who are deleted by the system automatically every 24h or so?

You, my friend, get the grand prize as you're correct! 

I got so tired of the spam problem here, I wrote my own "spam bot finding" script, and scheduled it to run a few times a day on our server. The first time I ran it, it found 79 bots! All are gone. Don't worry about your account suddenly disappearing- if you have a certain number of posts you're automatically excluded from the scan. 

Here is a question of a non-technical, not knowing anything about computers person  , but willing to learn or try to understand something: 
.........What are bots? 

Fieneke

[shangri la 1]

Glad you asked this question Fieneke2. It give me an opportunity to thank Dan and Pottel and others, behind the scenes here, for all the work they do to keep AMIT running as safely and as smoothly as it does. Great work guys!! 

Quote from Wikipedia:- "Forum spambots surf the web, looking for guestbooks, wikis, blogs, forums and other types of web forms which it can then use to submit bogus content. These often use OCR technology to bypass CAPTCHAs. Some spam messages are targeted towards readers and can involve techniques of target marketing or even phishing, making it hard to tell real posts from the bot generated ones. Other spam message are not meant to be read by humans, but are instead posted to increase the number of hyperlinks to a particular web site, to boost its search engine ranking.
This category of spambot has gained considerable notoriety since November 2006, with the introduction of XRumer, a forum and wiki spambot which can often bypass many of the safeguards administrators use to reduce the amount of spam posted.
One way to prevent spambots from creating automated posts is to require the poster to confirm their intention to post via e-mail. Since most spambot scripts use a fake e-mail address when posting, any email confirmation request is unlikely to be successfully routed to them. Some spambots will pass this step by providing a valid email address and use it for validation, mostly via webmail services. Using methods such as security questions are also proven to be effective in curbing posts generated by spambots, as they are usually unable to answer it upon registering."

[Best Brown Baggies]

Thanks Shangri la. I was unsure myself.
Now I know!

Cheers. BBB

[Waterline Man]

Cool! Technical genius, 23 years old (?)
LE

U talking bout me LE

[Fieneke2]

Thank you for explaining Shangri la!  It was interesting to read, uuhhhh I read it even twice to understand! 
I heard about spam before, but not about bots! 

Just like you I also want to say THANK YOU to Dan, Pottel and all the other administrators/moderators who keep this wonderful site going.
I know it takes a LOT of time to let it run! 

Fieneke

[IrisRose]

For every advance forum protectors like Dan make, the spam bot writers come up with a new way to invade.    Since Dan has written his own program to protect us and isn't using a commercial one, I'd think we are much more protected.