A note to all who may wish to join the Phrogram community.
We are getting a fair number of requests for membership in our web community from "individuals" who are in all likelihood spam-bots. They show up as randomly generated character email addresses and user names. These are being deleted manually.
We are using a fairly old version of Telligent's Community Server platform to manage our forums and upload areas for Phrogram.com (circa 2006, when we launched the site). Hopefully, that will change within the next few months when we upgrade to the latest version of CS at which point we can add a filter to web community sign-ups that you see on sites like ticketmaster, making sure a real person is completing the form.
But in the meantime, if you want to join the Phrogram site, please make sure that your name and email address bear some resemblance to what someone would actually use ... otherwise, don't expect to be activated just so you can try to harvest user names or create posts that are ads or do whatever things that "black hat" users would want to do by infiltrating a web community that is just focused on getting people interested in programming and having fun with Phrogram.
Thanks,
The Phrogram Team
Here is an idea for stopping the spam bots: On google, when you create an account, the last step is to enter the letters that you find in the image, and that is supposed to stop auto-created google accounts. Would the same thing work for the accounts here?
Cipherboy
3.14159265358979323846264338327950288419716939937510582097494459230781640628620899
Yes, it might - but phrogram.com runs on a relatively old version of Community Server (from 2006) and I don't think it has this feature. When we revamp the site and switch to a newer version (2008.5), hopefully in the next few months (the site will be down for a few days as a result, and we'll let everyone know in advance, I'm hoping it's something we can add.
As far as these new user account requests go, at least half are totally non-sensical user names and email addresses. I also occasionally send an email to email addresses requesting a reply to verify that a real human wants to set up the account. I've had about 3 replies to maybe 50 sent out. We also get a lot of new accounts with email addresses from Russian web sites (somewone@something.ru). Those are all being deleted. Phrogram does not have a Russian version and it is pretty well known that Russia is a "hornet's nest of malicious cyber activity."