In this post I talked about being contacted by an advertising service and covered four questions that I wanted to have answered. I have heard back from “Nicole” and here is what I have learned so far.

But first, I probably should apologize to “Nicole” if that is your real name. It just seems to me that many (most) board owners are probably male. (I’m not being sexist or politically incorrect here, I believe I could probably find statistics to back this up if I really tried. Or cared.) It also seems that board owners would likely respond to an email from “Nicole” or “Mary” or “Candy” more than an email from “James” or “Maurice” or even “Dave”. Marketing is such a funny subject… part sales, part psychology, part timing and luck. But I digress. Here are her responses and my comments to each of the four questions that I asked in my last post. And I will promote “Nicole” to a real person by dropping the quotes.

In no particular order…

More…

Looking For Patterns

Spammers don’t use established domains, not often anyway. There will be the occasional registration from gmail or yahoo that comes through but for the most part they seems to be more interested in getting their own new domains, spamming the heck out of everybody, and moving on. I noticed some trends after reviewing the log from my Checkbox Challenge MOD that I thought would be interesting to share.

More…

Here are the log entries:

+------------------+--------------+---------------------+
| log_email        | log_username | log_date            |
+------------------+--------------+---------------------+
| Didavi@yandex.ru | Robin        | 2007-09-09 06:01:18 |
| bahira@yandex.ru | Robin        | 2007-09-09 06:02:07 |
+------------------+--------------+---------------------+

Now I am not going to waste time searching for “Robin” being registered on other boards as the username is much too common. A search for the email addresses turned up only one hit. Then again, “Robin” might just be getting started.

What I see is an initial registration attempt that was successful at passing the Checkbox Challenge but that got rejected by a ban on yandex.ru. So they came back less than a minute later to try again with an alternate email address. That, too, was blocked due to a ban on yandex.ru. I guess what I am seeing is that I will still need to use the ban list for certain domains.

I checked on my biggest board and I have had 10 registration attempts from that domain since I started the Checkbox Challenge; none of them were successful. On another site: 19 registrations, no successes. On a third site: 20 attempts, zero successes. So my point is that anti-bot mechanisms are not going to be enough. I said that earlier, and I continue to gather evidence to support that claim.

Rats.

Unsolicited Email

I got an email today that was interesting. It came from “Nicole” and she wanted me to put her text ads (no gambling or “questionable” sites like warez) on the bottom of my site. They weren’t flashy ads, just plain text. And she said she would pay me monthly. Now here’s the catch:

I had never heard of this service until last week, when I got asked about the very same company from one of my blog readers. Apparently they are making the rounds.

Is it a scam? I don’t think so. Is it worth doing? Here’s what I found out so far, and what is bothering me about the contact from Nicole…

More…

A Check-Up From the Doctor

I will not install code for clients that was written by someone else without reviewing it first. There is a lot of bad code out there. There is also some very good code, don’t get me wrong about that. But many excellent MOD authors just don’t know databases as well as they would like. So the queries that they write may be functional, but not optimal. At this point in my involvement with phpBB I write most of my own MODs, so most of the time this review is for a private client who wants me to install something that I don’t already have or have no interest in writing.

At one point after I essentially rewrote a MOD for one of my clients they suggested that I offer this service via the Doctor Board. Hmm. Well. It’s an interesting idea. It wasn’t in my plans for this board when I started (and still isn’t) and I would much rather get my desired services completed and released first, but yeah, I could do that.

Probably in about 2012.

Maybe.

More…

In a word, “uh oh.”

My Checkbox Challenge MOD has so far proven to be remarkably effective at combatting spam. On boards with low new member rates it is blocking upwards of 90% of the registration attempts. On my biggest board where I get 10-15 new legitimate users per day, it’s still blocking about 45% of the registration attempts. So imagine my surprise the other day when I logged in to my board and found this post:

Thank you!
I’ll do it as you say!I think it’s useful!
Thanks again!

iphone accessories

And of course that last line was a link.

How did this happen?

More…

One of the ideas that comes up regularly when discussion tweaks to the phpBB2 search system includes the idea of setting up some sort of cron job that helps to maintain the search index table. There are a lot of transactions that hit that table during the posting process, and the posting process is what the user sees. If the posting process is slow, then the board “feels” slow. So I really like this next tweak, as it can improve the posting process quite a bit.

More…

I have no idea if this will be interesting or not, but I want to try it for a while and see what happens. I am going to start a series of SQL Challenge posts. The first one is based on a query that I wrote during one of my posts in my “Advertising on Forums” series. Since it was based on a table that is not part of phpBB I have provided a download link for a script that will create a simple version of the table for you to put into your database and play around with, if you are so inclined.

More…

RFM: It’s Not What You Think…

In Part II of this series I wrote about my ideas regarding what a potential advertiser would be looking for. Advertisers don’t care how big your board is, at least to some degree. You just have to have the right segment of users. Think about how valuable a board that catered to millionaires would be. If you had even 200 verified millionaires as members you can bet advertisers would be calling.

So what’s next? After looking over your subject matter here’s the next question I think you will want to be able to answer:

What is the RFM factor of my users?

What is RFM? Well, it’s probably not what you think.

More…

You may have seen this already as it seems to be making the rounds. But if you haven’t, it’s hysterical. It might fall into the NSFW category only if laughing out loud while reading something off of your monitor will get you into trouble. Just make sure you’re not covering up with an email from your boss while you’re laughing and you will probably be fine.

What is it? It’s a very creative eBay listing from a mother of six. Here’s how it starts:

I’m selling a bunch of Pokemon cards. Why? Because my kids sneaked them into my shopping cart while at the grocery store and I ended up buying them because I didn’t notice they were there until we got home. How could I have possibly not noticed they were in my cart, you ask? Let me explain.

You haven’t lived until you’ve gone grocery shopping with six kids in tow. I would rather swim, covered in bait, through the English Channel, be a contestant on Fear Factor when they’re having pig brains for lunch, or do fourth grade math than to take my six kids to the grocery store.

Read the rest of the listing…