NOTICE Use of disposable e-mail addresses prohibited

We have had an increasing number of spam bots attempting to sign up with disposable e-mail addresses. Fortunately, our anti-spam system usually catches these. Very often, it flags the user on user name and/or IP address, too. We have taken some time to ensure these addresses are blocked from registration.

Sadly, checks show multiple users already in the database. If you use a disposable e-mail address, chances are you'll already have had a PM asking you to change it. If you do not, you may find your account restricted or banned.

Q: What is a disposable e-mail address?
A: A disposable e-mail address is one that doesn't require sign-up. As the e-mails are read simply by visiting the site and entering your e-mail address, anyone can read them. They are usually deleted within a few hours, and the account cannot send mail.

Q: What's so bad about using a disposable e-mail address?
A: It's fairly self-explanatory, really:

• Anyone can access your e-mail address, so anyone can request a password reset and get into your ASSEMbler account. This is not secure. Only you may use your account here.
• Using a disposable e-mail address means you won't get notifications of new messages for you, either in threads or via PM. There may be an occasion where you haven't logged in for a while, but a staff member needs to contact you.
• If you use a disposable e-mail address, you have something to hide from us. We don't want that. We take your security seriously - only administrators can see your e-mail address (and only moderators can see your IP address). We won't make this information public.

(Case in point - I PMed 5 members in early February who have made posts before, asking them to change their e-mail address. None of them have logged in since, so none of them have seen my message.)

If you are using a disposable e-mail address, please ensure you change it immediately to your proper e-mail address, for the safety of your account. Thanks!

 

nice to see some protection against the spam bots. good work retro

 

Nice work!

Still amazes me that people wont just take 2 minutes to create an email address for either personal use or for forum accounts. Disposable email addresses should be used for Surveys at the most.

 

It's very kind from your side. Because most admins on some websites may immediately ban every account who had disposable e-mails without any warning, no matter if it real person or spam bot (but some people with temporary e-mail are real). Some websites (even some online games) also like to ban/forbid the use of e-mails from russian services/servers (like yandex) to prevent spam from largest and highly organized botnet (maybe chinese are bigger), that is pretty sad, because some of the admins, they decide to block the whole IP range (to cut off potential spam creators from any kind of interactions with the website) that includes many real persons.

 

Accounts with 0 posts and no sign in for 1-3 years were clearly not real users and were removed for security. The others get a reasonable amount of time to comply. They're only going to know we've noticed if they sign in regularly, and most of them usually haven't signed in for months, even years, and have less than 10 posts. We'll give them the opportunity to correct this... but, quite frankly, we're not talking about the type of user who makes a significant contribution to the community.

It's rare for us to block IP ranges - but it does happen. Some IP ranges have only been used by spam bots - usually in India/Pakistan. We don't want to stereotype or generalize, but we've had few, if any, genuine users in India. We're not going to block the whole of India as a result, but the fact of the matter is that there don't appear to be many people interested in rare video games there!

China does bring its share of spam bots, but we do have a few users based there. It's interesting to note that a lot of users in the East are Westerners out there. When you do have a Chinese member make an appearance, their contributions can be hampered by what appears to be a Google translation, sadly! I don't think we've ever blocked a Chinese IP, though - as we do have users posting from there.

 

Same. I have like 5 or 6 email addresses, but that was mostly back in the days when I would get banned a lot on the Flood forum of bungie.net.

So many alts...

 

Oh, so that's your dirty little secret DeChief??


DECHIEF EXPOSED!

 

Secret? Oh, no, trust me when I say everyone on the Flood knows I'm a complete asshole. I'm just not as bad these days because creating alts is way more effort than it used to be.

 

Ahaha, that's a good point