Defenses Against Bogus Accounts Continue

[DerVVulfman]

Greetings dear friends,

No one likes to be bullied by spam or advertisement content without consent.  However, many services attempt to find ways around preventative measures in order to ply their trade, seek to solicit services, or generally annoy what they see as potential customers.  It is one of the reasons that a new account must actually introduce themselves within the Occasions board as that very first "Here I am" thread would finally grant them access to their Private Messaging and Control Panel services.

It is no secret that the forum performs intermittent checks upon new accounts. When signing up for an account, the registration page makes this clear.  In fact, the registration notification was updated, not only to remind registrants that disposable eMail accounts are forbidden but that eMail addresses that are unable to receive notifications are disallowed.  This additional condition was introduced months ago as advertisers would employ a service that would be send-only for solicitation services.

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Boldly presented in red, it will be relatively hard to accept claims from registrants that they were unaware that such eMail services are not permitted.  However, advertisement services and those wishing to increase their customer lists care not. So while the forum does perform periodic checks to determine if a registrant attempted to slip past our anti-spam services, we also perform checks upon the validity of the registrant's eMail address.

Unfortunately, some fail drastically.

The eMail address presented here has been hidden, but clearly the registrant claimed to be using Hotmail as a service. But this is one of three tests we regularly perform, and had indicated above that the account was indeed not a real account. In some cases, we have had accounts that were designed not to receive eMails, and thus disallowed by our terms. However, the above screen indicated that Hotmail never had an account which this particular registrant provided.

Now it is true that this registrant would likewise not be able to send eMails like any solicitor bot, it does violate our terms of registration. And those terms are present to protect our members.  

As always, protection of Save-Point and its members is our chief concern.