NEW SOFTWARE "AMASS!" FOR POTN: WHITE PAPER

The problem with stopping all users with proxy type services is you risk stopping a person from a country that has harsh Internet filtering.

Many people in some countries with dictators are not allowed to use most forum type sites. Those users are ones I definitely would want to be able to participate if they can figure out how. I know many people from those countries who use all the tricks to get on forums are spammers, but for those who are not, I for one would appreciate being able to communicate with them.

How do you let the three or four citizens of those countries freely communicate on a forum like this one when you have to block the thousand that are trying to pull tricks to make a questionable extra "dollar" or two?

Nogo wrote in post #17140755
The problem with stopping all users with proxy type services is you risk stopping a person from a country that has harsh Internet filtering.

Many people in some countries with dictators are not allowed to use most forum type sites. Those users are ones I definitely would want to be able to participate if they can figure out how. I know many people from those countries who use all the tricks to get on forums are spammers, but for those who are not, I for one would appreciate being able to communicate with them.

How do you let the three or four citizens of those countries freely communicate on a forum like this one when you have to block the thousand that are trying to pull tricks to make a questionable extra "dollar" or two?

Are there spammers from countries who needs advanced proxy use to get international Internet access to forums? If they needs advanced tricks to get internet access, I would think it would be hard to take home any profit from the spamming - be it money or items.

The problem with the proxies is that you can't see the originating country.

We do get spam from proxy server sites. We also get spam from botnets. And as pwm2 says, you don't really know where the poster actually is in either of those cases. But I think it's a fair statement that there are very few countries from which we don't have active legitimate members coming in from native IP addresses, not from proxies. Maybe not North Korea; I haven't looked recently. But China's widely held to monitor internet activity from within its borders and we see a fair number of legitimate posts from there in addition to all the spam that gets here.

As to the financial argument regarding spammers using proxy servers - if they can churn out several hundred thousand spam posts to several tens of thousands of forums before they're trapped by the proxy host (if said host even cares about being used by spammers), the cost of a proxy host (which they may be "paying" for with stolen credit card info) is peanuts. And with automated software doing the spamming they can easily rack up posts as fast as a given forum will let them post, so several hundred thousand posts may only be an hours time.

Where is this site actually hosted at? If it is hosted in Finland or somewhere like that, being basically a neutral country politically, the countries like China are probably much more likely to allow access than if it was hosted in a country like USA or GB.

The IP indicates Houston, Texas, USA.

pwm2 wrote in post #17140952
The IP indicates Houston, Texas, USA.

Well, that rules out that theory of mine. I assume a .net makes it a USA based server, but you can't always go on that.

Nogo wrote in post #17141177
Well, that rules out that theory of mine. I assume a .net makes it a USA based server, but you can't always go on that.

No, I live in Sweden but my own web server doesn't use *.se but *.net. The big top domains are used by "everyone", and then you have a large number of national top domains where they sell domain names to foreigners. Like *.to, *.fm, *.tv, ...

It's the IP numbers that are (normally) geographically bound while much of the domain names may jump any which way.

pwm2 wrote in post #17141192
No, I live in Sweden but my own web server doesn't use *.se but *.net. The big top domains are used by "everyone", and then you have a large number of national top domains where they sell domain names to foreigners. Like *.to, *.fm, *.tv, ...

It's the IP numbers that are (normally) geographically bound while much of the domain names may jump any which way.

Got ya. When I did a Whois on the domain name it said the site was registered in Canada. Borders don't mean much at all now with the Internet, but I know they mean more to some countries than to most.

Does the new design have a preview before posting?? If not, you can leave it until the new design is launched (that's if you want to put it in, lol)

RichSoansPhotos wrote in post #17190325
Does the new design have a preview before posting?? If not, you can leave it until the new design is launched (that's if you want to put it in, lol)

Yes, it is feature rich and does have preview and many other nice things -- far more features than vBulletin software.

I was a bit put off by the Hello Kitty theme that Pekka is so keen on using.

Chet wrote in post #17191939
I was a bit put off by the Hello Kitty theme that Pekka is so keen on using.

Some of us are on the north side of sixty, so I had to Google Hello Kitty and still don't see any resemblance, but I take it that maybe you might be more of a listserv or Usenet kind of guy. I've come to the realization that we're getting older and that a featureless drab looking site isn't going to attract younger users.

Chet wrote in post #17191939
I was a bit put off by the Hello Kitty theme that Pekka is so keen on using.

And what is wrong with Hello Kitty, exactly??

Bill Boehme wrote in post #17191920
Yes, it is feature rich and does have preview and many other nice things -- far more features than vBulletin software.

Thought as much, because I had seen the beta, just forgotten it, hahaha