Vintage Minor Register

Is it only me or has anybody also noticed the weird user names lately

Yes, there have been seven new subscribers in the last week or so with weird names. The common thread seems to be that they all have weird e-mail addresses and are all gmail addresses. Orstin is a real person, however! Hugh, show your self!

Anybody have an idea what might be going on here?! I have noticed that the Yahoo Bot has been on the site a lot lately. Maybe this is related?

Orstin is meant to give a hint to my true motoring allegience! I consider the recent purchase of my M type as having been lured to the dark side!! Nothing more sinister than that, I can assure you!

Looking forward to getting to know all of you..

Hugh

I thought as much!

Orfully good to hear from you!

Welcome on board.
May the force be with you

Halbe

Just had another strange subscriber request which I rejected, and I deleted the others at the same time. I suspect this is a new mutant form of spam, as one of the e-mail addresses had the character string 'viagra' in its e-mail address!

From now, anyone who has a gmail account is going to have to prove themselves before being signed up!

Still getting one a day. Today's was called BuddyBuddy. When I checked, the e-mail address was emelina_nita@yahoo.co.uk. I googled the address and came up with:

http://www.stopforumspam.com/

I put the e-mail address in their search and came up with four entries.

The site was created to be used as a central database for known forum spambots.

So now we know! I'll check all future applicants against this site before authorizing.

From Wikipedia:

"Forum spambots surf the web, looking for guestbooks, wikis, blogs, forums and any other web forms to submit spam links to the web forms it finds. These spambots often use OCR technology to bypass CAPTCHAs present. Some spam messages are targeted towards readers and can involve techniques of target marketing or even phishing, making it hard to tell real posts from the bot generated ones. Not all of the spam posts are meant for the readers; some spam messages are simply hyperlinks intended to boost search engine ranking.

This category of spambots has gained considerable notoriety since November 2006, with the introduction of XRumer, a forum and wiki spambot which can often bypass many of the safeguards administrators use to reduce the amount of spam posted.

The easiest way to prevent spambots from posting on forums, wiki, guestbook, etc. is to enable email activation by installing a mail server on the host (eg: Sendmail, Postfix, Exim.), since most spambot scripts use fake or randomly generated names on real email providers, the emails will mostly never be successfully routed to them."

I was new to all this when I signed up, with a bit of thought I'd have come up with something a bit better!!! At the time members were generally using first names.

Good to see that we now know what's going on.
I think it's important to keep the site and forum as clean as we can

Regards,
Halbe

I'm not surprised that SpamBots are signing on to the site - but I'm a bit surprised that they haven't spammed the forum with Viagra offers etc. once they were in. Maybe Ian never let them come so far?

I received three applications to join the forum yesterday - but that all turned out to be real people! Among them was Peter Green, the MG 'elder', and John from DH Support, the official design authority for older DH aircraft. John is also an MG man.

I am now having to ask MI5 to conduct background checks on all new forum applicants - here is the dossier they provided me on John:

"John Reid was educated at Westminster School and Christ Church, Oxford where he read Chemistry and then completed his doctorate in Nuclear Magnetic Resonance. After a short spell on tyre development with the Dunlop Racing Division, John spent nearly 20 years at Marks and Spencer’s Head Office, with management responsibilities in both the Clothing and Food Divisions. In 1988, a return to the motor racing world found John at Pi Research in Cambridge, working on the business development of data loggers and analysis software for race cars and wind tunnels. Four years later this lead naturally to joining Ilmor Engineering, who design, manufacture and build the Formula 1 Mercedes racing engines for McLaren. John retired from Ilmor after ten years in engineering manufacturing and contributing to two World Championships, and is now part of the team at de Havilland Support; he attends the office two days per week.

John learned to fly on Chipmunks at Oxford University Air Squadron in the 1960s and gained his civil PPL on Tiger Moths. He has been a member of the Duxford Aviation Society for 12 years, working on David and Mark Miller’s Dragon Rapide. Outside aviation, John is interested in pre-war MGs and vintage tractors – in fact anything mechanical! He is married with three grown-up children, and lives in Orwell near Cambridge."

On the MMM forum there is a discusion about pictures on their threads.

I posted this on the MMM forum:

Yes we can post the picture's ourself using a website like "www.photobucket.com"
I think having picture's on the VMR forum greatly enhances it's appeal, It is also very easy to do .
Maybe some of you should take a look and join the VMR Forum

Regards
Halbe Tjepkema ( VG2007)

I'm glad they listened to my advice , not only our forum but also our cars have much in common


Regards
Halbe

Halbe,

You are a star - once again! I also just e-mailed the MMM Register to invite them to our Summer Rally and to participate in our upcoming Midsummer Auction. As of last night, we have at least 43 M Types in the VMR, not to mention a good smattering of other MMM and vintage models.

Re photos, since I run the website, I simply ftp pics to a /Forumpix sub-directory on the server, and then post a link to the pic. Unlike Photobucket, etc., it does take up server space, but is quicker, and I am very lazy! Anyone else with web space can do the same.