If you are newly registered to ESMB or have previously registered but have not posted to the board at all, this announcement affects you. For those who have at least one post on ESMB this will not affect you at all.
There is a new type of spammer around. These are signature spammers. They register a new account, put links in their signatures for all sorts of things (Viagra, porn, legal services, holiday villas etc) but they never post. Then apparently they spam their profile pages (which have their links in them) in emails and posts to other boards etc.
I have spent months deleting these guys and deleting them and deleting them. I have what is supposed to be a "spam stopper" registration process which works for automated spamming, but it doesn't stop the humans who want to register. Nothing stops them.
So to overcome this problem I have finally come up with a solution.
I have created a new user group which everyone who already posts to ESMB has been placed into. Your functionality won't change. For newly registered members there are now restrictions on what you can do until you make your first post. The board is still as viewable as it ever was, but you will not be able to upload an attachment, create or post a poll, create a signature, send a Private Message or email another member, post calendar events, view who is online, use a friend list, create photo albums or join or create social groups until you have made your first post.
Once you have made your first post you will be transferred across to the regular users group and these functions will become available to you. This may not be immediate as the software is set to run upgrade cycles hourly. But it shouldn't take more than one hour before these functions become available to you.
I hope this stops the problem.
(I previously posted this thread but it was wiped out in the DB crash)
There is a new type of spammer around. These are signature spammers. They register a new account, put links in their signatures for all sorts of things (Viagra, porn, legal services, holiday villas etc) but they never post. Then apparently they spam their profile pages (which have their links in them) in emails and posts to other boards etc.
I have spent months deleting these guys and deleting them and deleting them. I have what is supposed to be a "spam stopper" registration process which works for automated spamming, but it doesn't stop the humans who want to register. Nothing stops them.
So to overcome this problem I have finally come up with a solution.
I have created a new user group which everyone who already posts to ESMB has been placed into. Your functionality won't change. For newly registered members there are now restrictions on what you can do until you make your first post. The board is still as viewable as it ever was, but you will not be able to upload an attachment, create or post a poll, create a signature, send a Private Message or email another member, post calendar events, view who is online, use a friend list, create photo albums or join or create social groups until you have made your first post.
Once you have made your first post you will be transferred across to the regular users group and these functions will become available to you. This may not be immediate as the software is set to run upgrade cycles hourly. But it shouldn't take more than one hour before these functions become available to you.
I hope this stops the problem.
(I previously posted this thread but it was wiped out in the DB crash)
and a giant 
