Not very nice
they will loose lots of members by doing so!

I fully disagree with the choice too, but afterall they're entitled to do whatever they want with their program. I would've expected something more intelligent from their side though.

I'm a member of the paid email webmaster's forum. I've been watching the discussions between the PTR owners who have been hit by the fake signups that are coming out of China.
These owners are forced to spend hours a day deleting these illegal accounts.
I suppose if that happened to me, I would probably feel the same way.

Sorry but I back Richard on this however as with our program hope he will keep it as a temporary measure to nip the problems in the bud.

It's not just the fact of multiple sign ups but the fact that there are certain Chinese members out there who blatantly try to increase their earnings by signing up false accounts under themselves using domains such as sina.com, sohu.com, cmmail.com and so on.

These have nothing to do with the multiple sign ups and believe me it is common place for us webmasters to find these accounts time after time.

We stopped accepting new members from China over a month ago and have had nothing like the problems we were having since.

We know that the majority of members from China are good members but there are a lot that spoil it for the rest.

Unfortunately the only way at the moment is to limit sign ups or do we just leave it and spend all our time sorting through a database of 5000+ members. You wouldn't bvelieve how long this takes unless you actually run a program.

Marc

My point is that IMO big PTR's should spend more resources to actually figgure out a viable solution rather than choosing the most simple one.
I would have fully backed up Richard's choice should it have been presented to us as a temporary measure to block the avalance of fake subscribers. (I'm saying *presented* because I dont know his future plans regarding this). But the TOS says they dont accept members from China, period...

Why not set up IP logging which will stop a user from doing multiple signups. Email address matching with your database will save the webmaster(s) time. Its all fairly easy to setup if you need help with this please contact me.

I have started going throught this entire message board today after one of the programs I was in was talking about deleting everybody because of this.

I think it would be much better to get could code, business solutions in place to protect you from all this than to take your sites down... even if it costs you a little money in the beginning it can save you big bucks in the end. Not to mention time....

Good hosts, good code... all that helps improve the quality of your site, the number of people who sign up for your programs and the advertisers you get... Just my thoughts...

Some of these people are very determined. This is a problem I have seen for over 1 year of owning a program. I am tempted to close alot of signups myself, because not only are people cheating money, signing up false accounts, but the fake accounts I do miss, lowers the overal CTR.

I have various security measures in place, and time after time, they are bypassed, as you'd expect from someone very determined.

baph0met
Like I said there is a number of things that can be done... I see that you've done work for thse people are you afraid they are going to look elsewhere? There are a number of things that can be done to resolve the issues...

My husband has over 20 years experience did the backend work and a lot of the security work at garden.com - which by the way had a database of over 3 million users, chat and other things... they didn't have any problems with hacking and in fact were never down related to that and the longest they ever where down was 20 mins they kept their site where it could be restored very quickly.

Profound, security doesn't need to be profound I was offerring free advice. Don't expect my free advice to be profound.

I agree with the decision. It may in fact be only temporary until another solution is found. Things can and inevitably do change.

I also get most of my spam from China email addresses as well as about 1/3 of the attempts to access my PC through various ports come from China IP addresses as shown in my firewall logs.

That is not saying that all people in China are bad, I have a few friends who are from or still living in China. However, there does seem to be a lot of problems coming from people in China.

There is a ways to automate whatever you are doing to decide what is a multiple sign up by hand. Meaning anything you do by hand you can automate in the tracking/blocking process to prevent future problems with this. You just need to find a coder who can do this for you. There's lots of good coders on the net looking for freelance work especially with the recent downturn in the computer industry. I can recommend a few or you can search for them on job boards or post your projects there or you can contact me and I will try to point you in the right direction. There is many ways to fix the problems you all are having. Good Luck!