XF 2.2 How can a GUEST be able to post a thread on my forum

[oneobgynmd]

Im baffled. Lately we have been hit on a daily basis by spammers from Uganda and Nigeria who post everything from black magic, voodoo, spells, porn and women with phone numbers. Fortunately 99% are rejected when they apply as a registered member. In our group permissions a GUEST has permission only 1. to see forum 2. to view nodes, 3. to see threads and 4. to see content of threads. EVERYTHING else in GUEST permissions is set to NEVER> Today a user who under their name showed "GUEST" was able to post 2 new threads in one of our Sub Forums . How is this possible

 

[Mr Lucky]

Some forums utilize a banned group so that the user count goes up,

I don't understand how that would make the user count go up?

 

[frm]

I don't understand how that would make the user count go up?

Member registers, member count goes up by 1 when confirming email/valid.

Member gets banned, user count goes down by 1.

Placing member in a permission group with "Never", member count remains the same as if they joined.

Some forums purposefully place them in a banned group to inflate numbers.

New members see high user count, they're more likely to join. User count goes up. Psychology.

 

[CedricV]

Sometimes I put spammers in the unregistered/guest group. They’re able to log in, and view but do absolutely nothing. I hope that frustrates some.

 

[Suzanne O]

Member registers, member count goes up by 1 when confirming email/valid.

Member gets banned, user count goes down by 1.

Placing member in a permission group with "Never", member count remains the same as if they joined.

Some forums purposefully place them in a banned group to inflate numbers.

New members see high user count, they're more likely to join. User count goes up. Psychology.

This gets done with the Banned group

 

[frm]

Sometimes I put spammers in the unregistered/guest group. They’re able to log in, and view but do absolutely nothing. I hope that frustrates some.

If anything it uses their vCPU on their spam bot cloud compute instances.

Knowing that they cycle through forums and yours alone could cost them at least 10 cents a year, if they don't catch on and remove yours, should be heartwarming.

 

[CedricV]

If anything it uses their vCPU on their spam bot cloud compute instances.

Knowing that they cycle through forums and yours alone could cost them at least 10 cents a year, if they don't catch on and remove yours, should be heartwarming.

Lovely. I’ll keep going then.

 

[Mr Lucky]

Member registers, member count goes up by 1 when confirming email/valid.

Member gets banned, user count goes down by 1.

Placing member in a permission group with "Never", member count remains the same as if they joined.

Once you have banned them and the user count has gone down, placing them in a user group (whatever the permissions) does not make the user count go up again.

 

[frm]

Once you have banned them and the user count has gone down, placing them in a user group (whatever the permissions) does not make the user count go up again.

I'm saying that they are never officially banned.

Instead, you see this a lot with big boards (1m+ members). If you go community/members/mr-lucky.########/, you can still see their profiles with 0 posts.

Some profiles have usernames like viagraforsale (or another known spam product) that make things a bit more obvious what they're doing.

What they're doing is creating a new usergroup BANNED (or whatever they call it) that has permissions set to NEVER (can't post, reply, react, etc.) and adding spammers to that group.

This retains the "BANNED" member as a "valid" countable member in Forum statistics.

They aren't banned, per se, but they can't do anything on the forum other than login and log out, which is essentially being banned.

Don't believe me? Edit the number and visit profiles on big boards using XenForo (start at about 1/2 way, so if 1 million, start at 500000, like community/members/mr-lucky.########/, and count the suspicious "active members" going one by one and you might see an obvious spam account every 10 or so) to see member profiles and tell me they're not "banning" them to keep user counts high.

They're not being banned through the traditional ban system, rather just being assigned to a "banned" usergroup to inflate numbers.

 

[Mr Lucky]

Don't believe me?

I do believe you, I just thought we were talking about members actually who are actually banned.

 

[frm]

I do believe you, I just thought we were talking about members actually who are actually banned.

No. Probably just confusing by using the term banned loosely to describe it on my part.

 

[Mr Lucky]

No. Probably just confusing by using the term banned loosely to describe it on my part.

If I recall when banning a member in vBulletin what happens is they go into a banned user group. In xenForo as you know when you use the ban feature on someone they don't go into a usergroup.

It may be that if you import from vBulletin to xenForo then the banned user group remains but is no longer necessary unless you specifically want to use it for styling purposes, someone may correct me on this

 

[frm]

It may be that if you import from vBulletin to xenForo then the banned user group remains but is no longer necessary unless you specifically want to use it for styling purposes, someone may correct me on this

I'd give them a pass in 2010 or so, but the forums continue it to this day after migrating, so they know what they are doing.

If they purged all their banned members, or actually did a user group promotion to really ban them, their member numbers would drop hundreds of thousands. I don't know what SEO implications that might have, losing all of those indexed member profiles...

I don't know why they continue it.

It must be annoying for a Mike or John that wants to join, but they were added to the banned list — taking the user name — so they have to be Mike1 or something. I'm sure if you found a taken name that was "banned", an admin might swap it out for you though as it's not really in use.