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Discussion: Pornography everywhere on my wetpaint site
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robhumbracht |
Pornography everywhere on my wetpaint site
Aug 4 2010, 7:37 PM EDT
Hey guys,In the past 48 hours, I have had 10 separate users make accounts on my wetpaint site, all with their profile page consisting of links to pornography. This is annoying for many reasons, but it can be solved with one simple change. For site permissions, there are two rather draconian options: 1. Make the entire site private, in which case, no one can see the site unless they have already been invited. 2. Allow anyone to join the site (you can require them to be promoted to writers to contribute, but anyone can join and post a profile full of porn). If there were a third option, to require that a user must request (and be approved) to join the site, this would be solved. Is anyone else having this issue? If so, what are you doing about it? Do you find this valuable? |
shadowmlb |
1. RE: Pornography everywhere on my wetpaint site
Aug 4 2010, 7:47 PM EDT
Multiple sites were having this issue today, even here at Wetpaint Central we had at least one user do the same thing. Contact Jeremy and he should be able to IP ban the user for you. For now simply ban the users and make the site private for a short period of time.
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Evil_Genius77 |
2. RE: Pornography everywhere on my wetpaint site
Aug 4 2010, 8:59 PM EDT
Thank you, I'll do this!
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robhumbracht |
3. RE: Pornography everywhere on my wetpaint site
Aug 5 2010, 12:48 PM EDT
Is that the only solution? Our site (admitipedia.org) mostly attracts users who do not become members. If I set it to private, I will alienate the vast majority of the site users. If I don't set the site to private, I will continue to have to spend almost an hour each day banning members. I have had 25 people join the site in the last 12 hours only to post porn. Banning them is time-consuming and annoying. Our site is targeted at students applying to college, so it is completely inappropriate to have anyone posting such material. Is there any other solution coming? If not, I will have no other option but to abandon wetpaint. This will cost considerable time and energy on my end, and I will never be able to recommend this program to anyone else again. Please advise. 0 out of 1 found this valuable. Do you? |
Naru2008 |
4. RE: Pornography everywhere on my wetpaint site
Aug 5 2010, 1:13 PM EDT
| Post edited: Aug 5 2010, 1:14 PM EDT
Yes, for now. Jeremy and Kevin are working hard to deal with these users and get them off of Wetpaint. You don't have to turn your site on private forever. Just for a small period of time, like an hour or so, then make it public.Wetpaint is working hard to fix this problem. You need to be patient while Wetpaint fixs this problem. -Alex, Wetpaint Central Moderator 0 out of 1 found this valuable. Do you? |
zany2¢ |
5. RE: Pornography everywhere on my wetpaint site
Aug 5 2010, 2:16 PM EDT
""If there were a third option, to require that a user must request (and be approved) to join the site, this would be solved.""robhumbracht, I think your third option is a great idea. I just changed to private but this is NOT a solution. 0 out of 1 found this valuable. Do you? |
sowhat97 |
6. RE: Pornography everywhere on my wetpaint site
Aug 5 2010, 2:19 PM EDT
It's a temporary solution. Wetpaint is trying to fix it.
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robhumbracht |
7. RE: Pornography everywhere on my wetpaint site
Aug 5 2010, 2:58 PM EDT
Excellent to hear that you guys are working to solve the issue. Thank you!Although I appreciate that you are in the process of banning these members, I still think that a structural change to the security of wetpaint is the best approach. I'm no software engineer, but I can imagine that this would take a substantial amount of time to implement. I know, then, that this is a time-consuming and difficult change to make, but I think it would be worth it. I strongly advocate creating an option that would allow someone to have a public site but with the ability to approve new members. The site would be visible to all, but tthe only people that could become a member and post anything to the site would have to be approved. Right now, wetpaint really only has one option for site membership: anyone can join. Yes, you can choose whom you promote to be a writer, but you can't choose who joins the site. You can also take the drastic measure of setting the entire site to private. But once the site is private, new members cannot join. That means that each and every time you want to invite a new member, you have to change the site's permissions to make the site public. This alone is quite a hassle, and it also opens the site to pernicious spammers who want to send along their porn. But to make matters worse, I can't find any notification options to let me know when the person I've invited has actually joined. As a result, I'm constantly having to check the membership list to know when I can change the site back to private. In short, if you implement this option of allowing a site to be public, yet requiring approval for new members, it would solve a host of issues that wetpaint users have, allowing the site to be open to the public yet secure. Thanks for reading! 0 out of 1 found this valuable. Do you? |
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robhumbracht |
26. RE: Pornography everywhere on my wetpaint site
Aug 11 2010, 7:46 PM EDT
25 new members in the last 24 hours have posted profiles of pornography. Any more advice? Any solutions coming down the pipes?
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Posted Anonymously |
27. RE: Pornography everywhere on my wetpaint site
Aug 11 2010, 9:12 PM EDT
Your post answered my question as to whether it was safe to go public yet. (I made my site private last week.) It would be helpful if Jeremy and/or Kevin could give us an update. Well, by e-mail to those who submitted requests.Some of the moderators said only wikis with customization are affected. So, have the culprits found a particular Wetpaint database? 0 out of 1 found this valuable. Do you? |
walrusworldstudios |
29. RE: Pornography everywhere on my wetpaint site
Aug 11 2010, 11:22 PM EDT
I talked with Jeremy this afternoon and I have a small update. Currently, the Wetpaint Database is down. That means, Jeremy, along with the other employees, cannot track these members down and IP ban them from the Wetpaint site. For now, I suggest making the websites that got attacked private. This way, these users cannot join and post pornography. Once Jeremy tells me the Database is fixed, he can continue to fight these users off and IP ban them from your Wetpaint Sites. -Matt 2 out of 3 found this valuable. Do you? |
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Posted Anonymously |
30. RE: Pornography everywhere on my wetpaint site
Aug 12 2010, 6:38 AM EDT
My website contains a lot of kid-friendly content, so when I found out that this was going on, it truly made me sick. A few thousand people view my website each month, most of my visitors are kids under the age of 16. The spammers are using an ip proxy to access Wetpaint, which is why it is hard to stop them. My idea on how to stop them is not to make the site private, and having to approve all new members is a lot of work if your site is popular. I think you should add a way to simply ban more than one user at a time. It may not fix the issues, but it is good enough for me and my community. Ps. I hate my iPod's spellchecker. 0 out of 1 found this valuable. Do you? |
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Fermi |
31. RE: Pornography everywhere on my wetpaint site
Aug 12 2010, 8:10 AM EDT
would not an email verification system for new members reduce the spamming
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PedroAsani |
33. RE: Pornography everywhere on my wetpaint site
Aug 12 2010, 10:46 AM EDT
| Post edited: Aug 12 2010, 10:50 AM EDT
Yes, but not by much. They would need some kind of procedure to prevent an automated system simply following all links in an email.Something like follow this link, and enter the code in the box. CAPTCHA might work there.
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DeirdreB |
34. RE: Pornography everywhere on my wetpaint site
Aug 12 2010, 11:50 AM EDT
I had 50 porn sites join today who is Jeremy and how do I contact him
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sowhat97 |
35. RE: Pornography everywhere on my wetpaint site
Aug 12 2010, 12:10 PM EDT
jeremy_wetpaint send him a PM.
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jeremy_wetpaint |
36. RE: Pornography everywhere on my wetpaint site
Aug 12 2010, 12:31 PM EDT
"jeremy_wetpaint send him a PM."We are aware of the spam attacks on the network and are working as fast as we can to implement measures that will at the very least slow down and discourage anyone from spamming on Wetpaint. In the meantime, all I can recommend is that you stay vigilant of new members that join your site and ban spammers as needed. You can set up an email notification that will tell you when a new member joins your site. See http://www.wetpaintcentral.com/page/email+notifications if you are not sure how to do this. 1 out of 2 found this valuable. Do you? |
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Posted Anonymously |
45. RE: Pornography everywhere on my wetpaint site
Aug 12 2010, 2:16 PM EDT
""You can set up an email notification that will tell you when a new member joins your site.""I did NOT get email notifications with any of the culprits. I had setup the email notification a couple of years ago and it was working as recently as July 17, 2010. 0 out of 1 found this valuable. Do you? |
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Posted Anonymously |
48. RE: Pornography everywhere on my wetpaint site
Aug 12 2010, 3:28 PM EDT
I also didn't get notification even though I had it enabled. I found out from my weekly digest that I had 100 pornos.
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apmillard |
51. RE: Pornography everywhere on my wetpaint site
Aug 15 2010, 2:00 PM EDT
Same here. Approx half of my 250 members are porn spammers who signed up in the last week or so, and I did not get email notifications of their signing up. I don't have time to block these individually. How about adding a "Bulk Ban" feature - which would be a list of members (preferably sortable by date of registration, a checkbox for each, and a button for Ban selected members. 2 out of 2 found this valuable. Do you? |
