[Anonymous]

#1020296

Good morning warriors,

The staff at the NGDF has been working with the service providers to try to find a solution to the issue of people being bumped or suspended on the bulletin board. In a nutshell what is happening is the spammers and scammers have been active. It is causing a universal problem with hundreds of thousands of web sites across the world.

Spammers and scammers have developed software to sign in to sites, to see if they can be validated. Then they run a program to try to find all the e-mail addresses for that site and use them to send spam or to hack the systems of the sites they logged into.

We use an automated program to try to weed out the spammers and scammers. That program is updated dozens of times a day. That is why you may be able to log in and get validated only to try to log in later and be denied access. Multiple sites elsewhere have had spam or scam attacks and that prompts a change to the software that blocks those domains from access to our site and thousands of others world wide.

That prompts a flood of e-mails to our volunteer admin staff asking why a person was banned when they were just able to sign in a few moments or day ago. We in turn try to find out why a person was blocked only to find out it was automatic due to spam and scam attacks.

Talking to our service provider we have found that on an average day our servers detect and block over twenty attempts to hack into our server or to block denial of service attacks. A denial of service attack is a concentrated attack at specific service providers to flood their servers with so much e-mail traffic that it overloads them and makes them have to shut down or reboot. Thus denying you the service of using our site to ask questions.

This left us with three options.

1. Pay for better software to track spammers and scammers, which we cannot afford.
2. Continue on the current course and have people blocked and unblocked in an arbitrary fashion, causing frustration with the users and using tons of hours to try to track down individual requests to be unblocked. We are all volunteers and that takes away from our ability to provide support. Also a version of denial of service.
3. Restrict access to post to the bulletin board to active members of the National Graves’ Disease Foundation. This will limit posters to only those who are active members. But it will still allow the world access to read our bulletin board and to use the search function.

After much discussion we have decided on option 3. Starting 1 November 2006 access to post on the bulletin board will be on a membership only basis. What will happen is we will receive a current membership listing and those on the list will be validated come 1 November 06. All other people who are currently validated to post will lose that ability come 1 November 06.

What membership in the NGDF will give you is the ability to post to the board, receive answers from trained facilitators, receive and send mail to other members of the bulletin board and a quarterly newsletter with the latest information on Graves’ disease.

E-mail information will only be visible to members not people who read the board or use our search function to find information. That will stop all scammers and spammers. By the user becoming a member we know who our users are and that will stop the scammers and spammers in their tracks.

We will also be starting a new feature by years end. We are teaming with a group of doctors to make the bulletin board interactive. When you read a post asking about RAI for example, when you put your mouse over the word RAI it will give you a drop down box offering you a glossary telling you what RAI is, or offering you the chance to read articles written by medical professionals about RAI as treatment options.

Using our search function will be able to give you the ability to access medical papers written on the subjects you are searching. The whole process will be interactive allowing you to decide how much or how little information you want to read about your question.

We regret having to make the board a membership only posting but it was the only choice we had to protect the posters and our servers from spammers and scammers. We will post more information as it become available.

Jake George
Facilitator, webmaster
National Graves’ Disease Foundation

[Author]

Posts