Delete my account

[Muhammad]

We don't report accounts to advertisers. The unique account number is generated by our system and it's just a number, nothing personally identifiable about it. Everything submitted, we have the rights to keep on the site. We remove content as a courtesy if there's a request, but in light of the fact that content is requoted and deleting all posts of a member would not delete those quotes, it's not really wiping out an account completely just by deleting all of its posts. Having said that we've deleted many threads on request of the poster who had some reason to want it off the internet and will continue to do that as a service to members.

Usually when people ask for account deletion they want to stop getting email notices.

 

[RayfromTX]

On the site I moderate we only delete threads or posts for specific reasons such as if they contain personal identifiers. Deleting an account is a nightmare of unintended consequences. One option that might work for some is to change the user name which we allow to be done once. As far as the number of users, our site has 250,000 members. The vast majority of those are users with 0 posts that seem to be set up by spammers but not used. Also at any given time, only about 10% of the visitors to the site are actual members so member count is almost not connected to site traffic at all.

 

[Einthewoods]

FP forum is for gladiators, never been, no desire to test those waters.

More like misbehaved children

 

[majorwager]

Rayfrom TX

Curious why anyone, spammer or not, would go to the effort to establish an account and never use it? The spam folks on TBN, seem to start one thread, then it is deleted. Don't know if their account is deleted as well?

Does your site allow guests to read ALL content w/o membership?

There are a significant # of TBN members who seldom post yet their membership spans back many years in some cases. Wonder if the website tracks member activity in specific threads if they only read but forgo input?

It seems logical that if a spammer is using the same IP address repeatedly, to establish bogus accounts, that type of chicanery could be detected? And blocked or somehow defeated as noted.

 

[MossRoad]

Let's say you have a spammer that uses an IP address that belongs to an internet service provider, for example. IP addresses are assigned through a pool, and you rarely get the same IP address every day from your internet service provider. So every day, or even multiple times per day, the spammer gets a different IP address from his Internet Service Provider.

There's something like 3.5 Bilion with a "B" IP public IP addresses, so good luck with that.

So let's say you block the IP address of a Comcast spammer. You may also affect any one of thousands of Comcast customers that randomly get assigned that IP address.

There's just a lot more to it than blocking IP addresses on a one-for-one basis.

 

[RayfromTX]

Rayfrom TX

Curious why anyone, spammer or not, would go to the effort to establish an account and never use it? The spam folks on TBN, seem to start one thread, then it is deleted. Don't know if their account is deleted as well?

Does your site allow guests to read ALL content w/o membership?

There are a significant # of TBN members who seldom post yet their membership spans back many years in some cases. Wonder if the website tracks member activity in specific threads if they only read but forgo input?

It seems logical that if a spammer is using the same IP address repeatedly, to establish bogus accounts, that type of chicanery could be detected? And blocked or somehow defeated as noted.

First, MossRoad speaks the truth in post #25.

In answer to your questions though I can only say that I have no idea why a spammer registers an account and doesn't post but it may be how they get paid. These accounts will have an avatar that looks like a stock head shot photo and an American sounding generic name. The IP will be from Pakistan or Philippines or similar English speaking country in the far east. There may be 10 of them opened by different people every day and sometimes more. Often they will claim to be from Chicago or some other midwestern city in the US.

We define spam for our purposes as any post that offers a product or service unrelated to the subject of our board. Offering products and services related to our activity is not spam but if it is off topic in the thread it will be deleted. If it is spam by our definition we use what we refer to as the spam hammer. One click deletes all traces that they ever existed and marks their address and IP on a list for the future.

Guests can read all content but not post.

If a user is banned for any other reason we keep a record of every IP that they have used on our site. We have a tool to find shared IPs but it is only a bit useful because major internet providers will share IP between users and when they try to come back as a sock puppet the eventually start using proxies or VPNs to get around our sleuthing. The thing they can't hide is their posting behavior. They may try to appear as a new personality but the behavior that got them banned will present itself soon as it is the reason that they post in the first place. I have banned almost a dozen puppets from one person but they finally quit trying. It was whackamole for a while.

Good moderation btw is a valuable thing. It takes time to develop a philosophy and process that works and special people to implement it with fair and wise patience. This board is lucky in that regard. Not all are.