Question to forum administration.

[boardingpass]

I have a question related to this thread: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=250369

Did somebody from administration ban/delete inactive forum accounts(1 time per year, 2 times per year...)?
If not, you should do that! This forum is related to finance and security must be priority.
There is plugins for that, you don't need to do that manually. There should be plugin for SMF.

I checked member list, there is about 85k "Brand new" members, i bet that more than 30% are inactive for 5 months. They are targets to bruteforcers. A lot of people are using weak passwords.

I don't yet know how it's here, but on forums where i am, people always checking reg. date before doing any business. Reg. date is one of the trust factors. Of course 0 posts and reg. date 2010 trading will look suspicious, but always there is also inactive members in another member groups where is members with posts and old registration.

I administrate some forums and i know what i am talking about.

[jackjack]

Reg. date is one of the trust factors.

This is plain stupid

Bruce Wagner, pirateat40, etc...

[jackjack]

This is plain stupid

Bruce Wagner, pirateat40, etc...

one of the trust factors... i don't know the nicknames you writed, but of course trusting only reg date is not a good idea. You can't beat all scammers, but you can reduce scammers in your community by taking some steps in managing of community

I just meant that the problem is the trust people put in old members.
If it is widely known that accounts can be bought, this trust disappears. IMO this is the better way to reduce scammers.

[qwk]

You see, there's no way to stop scammers from scamming people.

You think you make it harder for them if they no longer can bruteforce and hijack inactive newbie accounts.

But that assumption is probably wrong.
All it would result in would be an increased effort on the behalf of the scammers to gain access to "better" accounts, meaning an increased trading of "handraised" sock-puppets.

"The 600 series had rubber skin. We spotted them easy, but these are new. They look human... sweat, bad breath, everything. Very hard to spot."

Really, for a diligent reader of this forum, detecting scam is not so much of a problem.
For all the other readers who will gladly throw their money at whoever promises the highest return, there's no hope whatsoever.

[John (John K.)]

This is plain stupid

Bruce Wagner, pirateat40, etc...

one of the trust factors... i don't know the nicknames you writed, but of course trusting only reg date is not a good idea. You can't beat all scammers, but you can reduce scammers in your community by taking some steps in managing of community

I just meant that the problem is the trust people put in old members.
If it is widely known that accounts can be bought, this trust disappears. IMO this is the better way to reduce scammers.

Well, this. No point giving the new users a false sense of security. If anything, the account selling threads probably gave newbies a nasty shock and the awareness of scams.

[Mike Christ]

Somewhere i agree to you. But as i wrote "You can't beat all scammers, but you can reduce scammers in your community...".
There's no way to stop scammers from scamming people, but doing nothing is not improving situation at all, allowing to people sell forum accounts and allowing inactive accounts is good ground for scammers. Of course there are people really good in scamming and this will not stop them, but most part of scammers are kids or just idiots. Inactive member list cleaning and controlling clones is not so hard nowadays(there is a lot of forum plugins), but will save bunch of not so advanced people from being scammed.

In every "profession"(i don't know how to call scamming) are newbies/kids and professionals. You can't fight professionals(maybe professional can fight professional, but professional always will cost money), but you can fight newbies/kids for sure and keep your community safe.

All that is just IMHO and based on my experience administrating forums with marketplaces. And doing all these little things helped people to save money. The number of scammed users dropped.

I don't believe it's preferable to prevent people from getting scammed; this incubates suckers.  You're simply giving the community the fish and increasing their reliance on you to do anything.  Rather, people should be exposed to scammers, all kinds of scammers, so they'll know who to trust and who not to trust on their own, which will be a skill they'll keep forever.  You may want to protect us from the "kiddies" and the "idiots", but if we can't even protect ourselves from them, then what does that say of the community?  What's below an idiot?  Apparently, "not so advanced people"