mooniac58

Another one that paid the $2 fee to validate and spam. Who would have thought...

Yeah the real infestation happened over a few days in early August - then it was hundreds of topics being posted in just a few hours. Prior to that we had them here and there but nothing like that. Crazy thing is today I had a spammer register, pay the $2 fee for instant validation and then immediately make a bunch of spam posts. I'm expecting them to file for some kind of refund/chargeback through PayPal now. Hopefully that will not become the new problem...

Changing the advertising is on my list of to-do's for the site but it is a lot of work I don't have time to dive into right now. Like I said before the current system is a simple one line of code drop in for the site and the other way would be to setup an ad delivery system like Google Ad Manager and insert ad locations manually into pages. For now, if new users cannot deal with the ads and can't pay to be a supporter then they will have to go to another site to get their Mooney community I suppose.

You are seeing ads because you are no longer a supporter. Your last donation was more than 12 months ago so it reverted back to a Verified Member. If you upgrade to Supporter you won't see the ads anymore. This is now $25 a year instead of "$10 minimum donation" as for the past 17 years. You can upgrade now using the new system HERE.

@midlifeflyer does not have a Supporter level account at this time which is why the ads. Likely not malware, etc. Nothing changed with the advertising. I have always used Google AdSense and it is one line of code that I drop on the site and Google handles all of the ad placements. Ads displayed are typically based on your browsing history and any other way Google can spy on you. I am 90% certain that they are listening in on your phone mic because my wife and I or a coworker and I will have a chat about some obscure thing and within hours I see ads about that strange topic. I actually use the site with the ads turned on just so I can keep an eye on them. For me I see a bunch of auto parts stuff because recently I have been trying to fix up my truck to sell it:

I could dig around and see if there are options for me to do that within the forum software.

Hello all, After a rough couple months of spam-bot invasions I have decided to make some critical changes to the way new users to the community are validated and how Supporter level memberships work. Here are the key changes: When a new account is created here it will be placed in a group called Unverified Members. This group can browse the site but cannot create any new content. To upgrade this account to a Verified Member you have two options: a) pay a $2 fee for instant validation which is good for the life of the account or b) contact me @mooniac58 with a picture/scan of your valid ID to prove you are who you say you are. The old manual $10 minimum donation for upgrade to Supporter level has been replaced with a $25/year automatic subscription system that will renew every year on its own unless you cancel it. No more waiting for me manually upgrade your account, etc. Those that purchase the $2 instant validation will get a $2 credit towards their first year of Supporter level access...so $23 for the first year and $25 thereafter. Generic Donations: Separate from the membership plans, users can still donate arbitrary amounts to support the site using the new donations page. Those that donated prior to today with the old system will continue to have Supporter access until 12 months from your last donation as long as that was $10 or more. These are the current membership levels for members: Unverified Members - New accounts, can browse site, cannot create content or message others. Verified Members - Either paid the $2 fee or proved in another way that they are a real person. Can post new content but not in classified forums. Limited to 200MB total storage for attachments, photos and other files. Supporter Members - Signed up for $25/year subscription. Do not see advertisements on site. Able to post non-commercial topics on the classified forums. Storage limit of 1GB. Sponsor Members - These accounts have paid a fee to have a limited number of commercial posts on the forums (usually 1 per month limit). Some final notes: While I am confident new spam-bots are not being registered on the site, I am quite sure that they have dormant accounts that were created in the past that still exist undetected. For this reason we have and will see brief uprisings where they rise up and make a bunch of spam posts. We will ban each of these as they occur and wipe the content. I don't expect much of this and the past few days have been clear skies here. If you created an account prior to August 5, 2025 and did the normal email based activation then you are in the Verified Member group. No one was downgraded during this process and you don't need to do anything to validate your account. Please do not do the $2 validation process (I am still working on hiding this option for everyone except unvalidated accounts in the site). I will be making small changes here and there to try and make it more clear how new users validate their accounts. For now I hope newly registered members find their way to this topic to get the instructions. Eventually I hope to figure out how to customize the site more to guide new members through the process better. And lastly a big thanks to everyone who has supported this community over the past 17 years! Craig

Or just an AI bot they assigned to this task. Would be childs play for an AI setup to run this whole operation and keep track of accounts, posts as well as our typical response times, etc, etc.

Blasted the last 2 accounts that started spamming. Again, these are not new accounts but rather old accounts they have from before they never used. We will just keep nuking them all until there are none left...

It was all from one account created Saturday. Again, the accounts that got through that did not spam yet are going to have to be weeded out as they pop up and use them. I don't have any way to know which accounts are bots and which are real since they use US based IP addresses and relatively normal looking account names.

I think the best solution that has not been invented yet to my knowledge will be AI based countermeasures for the bots. This is also true in the hacking world - AI can hack systems now with ease and the only thing they can do to stop it is develop AI to stand at the gates to fight the AI hackers. I'm sure in the near future we are going to see AI based defense systems for websites to counter non-human registrations as well as hacking. Don't bring a knife to a gunfight

Yeah apparently they had not yet used some of the accounts they created before I restricted new registrations. These might still creep in for a few days until we weed out the last remaining accounts. Please report these to me using the "report" option in the "..." menu at the top right of the post. Thanks!

Not really a way to tell other than check your PayPal history. If the new system works as I hope it will then you will have all those details in there.

From what I can see in the forum software only administrator level accounts can approve/reject new accounts and that would mean anyone I gave that level of access to would also have the ability to essentially wipe out the entire site.

A small one time fee of $3 (PayPal will take 50% of that in their fees) is likely what I will do with a secondary slower and free option of emailing me some docs to prove identity or something like that. I still want people to be able to register for free - but if they create an account and want to post RIGHT NOW then they will need to pay the fee.