Re: Spam/bogus join requests
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As the owner / moderator
of 3 groups I can appreciate Helen's frustration with the bogus
membership requests. It's obvious from the email addresses that
these are generated by phishing robots. Culling these bogus
membership requests should not be the responsibility of individual
group owners and moderators. There are some very good tools
available to deny global membership to robots. The best I have
seen requires a confirmation by visual recognition feedback, i.e.
select all of the boxes which have a cat photo, or all of the
boxes with a number, etc. Wrong selection and the requester is
toast.
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The 14 day aging on the pending list is ludicrous. Helen' list would grow to nearly 2000 if she waited for the system to handle the list. I am experiencing different levels of phishing requests on the 3 groups and it appears to be related to the group name. If it smacks of opportunity the group is attacked! My group named "nbems" receives less than 10% of the bogus requests experienced by "linuxham". The group "larg" is seldom targeted. Please get this fixed!! David
On 03/31/2017 04:12 AM, Helen wrote:
We are getting swamped witth these. We've gone from 7-15 pending members a day to 50-100. The problem, Shal, is firstly the sheer volume (trying to fiind the person to approve in a list of five pages) but mainIy it's that we no longer know who is legitimate, so the people who are legitimate are no longer getting the help they need to join the group. We used to leave members pending for 3-5 days and send reminders to them but if we leave them for five days I could end up with 250 pending members or more. Even though I no longer give them so long to respond, we regularly have three pages worth of so-called pending members. I just rejected 115 or so this morning. It's pretty obvious with some of them (I kind of guessed with donotreplyATairbnb.com), and when I had a host of them from one particular Russian company domain (weird that all the staff suddenly had sick cats), but I can't tell with all the gmail and yahoo addresses. Ideally I'd like groups.io to somehow filter the baddies (this never used to happen, but I do have a join option on my website, I don't know if that's a factor) but I know that's easier said than done. At the moment I'd prefer the NC members not to show (they never did with yahoo!groups) but since I then wouldn't know about the legitimate NC members, maybe the system could send the confirmation e-mail to them every day. I'm open to other suggestions. Thanks. Helen On Tue, Feb 28, 2017 at 03:34 pm, Shal Farley wrote:What is it the restricted group mods don't like? That is, it is perilous to suggest mitigation ideas when I don't know what it is they don't like having to "deal with". Is it the pending member notification? Maybe that can be deferred until the person confirms. Or maybe notification of an unconfirmed pending member is a separate notification checkbox. Is it the mere presence of these NC members in their Members list? I don't see much hope for that without breaking the ability for mods to help legit but NC members get confirmed. Maybe a "confirmed only" view of the list in addition to Moderators, Pending, Bouncing and Banned?
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