maybe expect some new members

http://www.gimptalk.com/cgi-sys/suspendedpage.cgi

Well, you beat me to it... GT had DB errors this morning so that could be the final result... otherwise it has been hacked

Come to think of it the "account suspended" message isn't using the GT design, so it could be GT's provider telling us that the GT account is suspended (possibly a DB overload of some sort).

I didn't notice this, you may be right and I do hope that you are.

@Wallace: We have certainly not intentionally suspended you or anyone else. This looks directed to the site itself.
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Griatch

Thanks Griatch,

I'm sure it is as you've explained, because that does make much more sense. Also, I may have displayed an exaggerated response to the issue.

Yeah; I get email notices (several daily) from GIMPTalk that I signed to those major topic threads. It's pretty bad at GIMPTalk right now since there appears to be no policing there anymore (if there ever were). The Registry also gets its fair share of bogus posts. Sad that the hackers are hacking the GIMP communities and I really suspect it's the Photoshop heads doing it (I'm that paranoid and think of conspiracy things like this; lol). I just wish we had a weapon agains these hackers; Tux somehow keeps them at bay, but it's getting more and more ugly folks.

If you knew how many spam posts we remove and how many spammers we ban every day you wouldn't say that. But yes, spam has increased a lot lately.
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Griatch

Sorry to hear that Griatch; I know you moderate there and it must be a pain. Not sure how Tux does it, but there's gotta be a way to stop these spambots at GIMPTalk. I respect your input in that you are doing your best to alleviate the issue and I both apologize and stand corrected.

We keep the site here guarded with bear traps, and snares.Ain't nobody gettin in that don't belong.
Maybe Gimp Talk should get some bear traps too.
j/k
Tux is a genius when it comes to keepin out the riffraff.

I can't take much of the credit, Rod. Between you, Odin, Molly and O, spammers don't last very long around here.

With the ever changing questions & responses, I don't think too many bots are gonna get the past our captcha so a human is gonna have to assist. That does cut down on a lot of spam and is one of the most important things a forum can do.

A site can get their account suspended for a variety of reasons, like not paying the bill, using up too many resources, spamming or even some script/code segment that's acting up, ..things like that. That's probably what happened to GT. I doubt it was hacked.

I won't make any claims about the security of this site. There are always exploits. I do have to credit my webhost for doing a good job on their end.

Actually it's the same everywhere and I don't think it's specifically directed at Gimp. If your site starts showing up in audience ratings they come over.

And yes, the spam-to-useful-post ratio on GT has gotten quite bad recently, but I'm not convinced they are "bots". Manpower can be dirt cheap.

Another good anti-spam measure is to disallow posts with offsite links until the new member has x number of posts. Spammers usually just give up. If not, they are usually spotted before they can sneak in 5 posts.

We also delete new accounts with zero posts, after a couple of days. All the members here must have at least 1 post. No zombie registrations or sleeper agents.

Not very practical on a Gimp help site where the attachment quota is very low, alas...



I do see people who make several totally content-free posts from time to time on GF. Sleeper agents indeed.

I'm not really following you here. New members, with legit questions, won't have any problems getting a link (or image) up, if needed. Spammers, on the other hand, will usually just leave when they discover they can't post with embedded links. The spammers' zombie registrations soon gets deleted. Plus, it's all automated.

Since implementing a good captcha, along with the other anti-spam measures I mentioned, the number of spammers we have to manually deal with has dropped off considerably.

Since I have been frequenting this forum, I have never come across incidents of spam, or at any rate I haven't even been able to notice them; a sign that the undertaken measures work fine and operate quickly.

Not talking about GimpChat but about GimpTalk. Attachments are capped at 500K total per user. First-time users cannot attach large pictures (500K is small for an XCF), so they have to let newcomers use links.