forum registration

[trinidad]

Installed and updated 3.4 64bit on an old friends laptop for him. Set up his e-mail for him and am trying to register him at the forum. Registration keeps kicking me to error: Error with Anti SPAM DB. Connection failed.


Sorry my error. gmx is banned.

TC

[elelme]

Why would GMX be banned? Do you mean gmx.com? The free email?

[trinidad]

gmx mail yes, along with yahoo, outlook, and mail ru. read the forum user agreement. apparently gmail doesn't work either though it's not mentioned because I just tried it. this is definitely going to come back and haunt me because I have set up many many new installations of LL with gmx mail for customers and friends. I've personally hated free email ever since Linuxwaves and XRS ended. How annoying for new users too. I dunno but if you eliminate gmail and gmail derivatives and mail.com and derivatives and mail.ru and derivatives because of spambots you pretty much eliminate every major player in the free email options. What this really means is that new Linux Lite users converted from MS have to use paid for email to register at the LL forums. By the way so called "bots" were invented by google and all search engines use them. hackers build them into malware to harvest usage info. thinking about this a little harder it seems to me that maybe the server is too small, and/or the spambot security scanner can't get the job done fast enough. the future may be that forum sites may have to provide an on deck limited email server, (the old MS, Yahoo, Google model from the get go). good luck with this because spambots are here to stay, and eliminating free email address registrations on forum sites is not going to have any effect on the free mail providers, and is counter-intuitive to the FOSS philosophy anyway. New computer users are going to collect garbage usually out of simple minded curiosity, and free email bots make money for the providers. You'll never change that. Maybe we need a form of check sum registration, simpler given the number of downloads compared to the number of free email users. The audience is Windows converts. Clickers. It's hard enough for most of them to fill out the registration form.

TC

[Artim]

GMX is blocked by a whole bunch of ISPs as a known source of spam and malware.  I'm down to using my ISP-provided e-mail, and even that at first was troublesome. 

[Valtam]

Our registration agreement is just that, an agreement. It means people agree to the conditions set out by the forum administrators.

Gmail isn't blocked, in fact it's on the allow list. Bots using GMX are the worst spammers we have ever had. The fact that people still use Yahoo mail after all the breaches in security they have had, well, if people continue to use something that has had their security repeatedly breached, what can you do. Using an ISP email address should work each and every time. At this stage I'll re-allow Outlook, but if it becomes a problem again, it will go back on the disallow list. This forum site has almost 100% legitimate accounts. I'll rather lose the odd registration than significantly expose our site to more forum bots.