Young Writers Society

January 11 Update: User registration is now re-enabled.

On January 7, 2020, there was an attempted hack by way of the user registration system. For a very quick explanation of how this attack attempted, please see:


https://www.xkcd.com/327/

Needless to say, the attack was not successful. However, there has been a very steep rise in these kinds of attacks lately, and so I'm shutting down the user registration system until I can get a handle on it. That should take about 2-3 days.

If anyone has any questions, please feel free to ask them.

Does this have to do with the spam that's been popping up in the welcome mat lately?

Yeah, and all the one-use accounts advertising things?

Does this mean no YWS for 2-3 days?! Tell me exact days, please, @Nate.

@Liberty I think it just means no more new users for 2-3 days, but I don't know.

Ah, okay that makes more sense. Thanks, @LZPianoGirl!

Quick update as it's been 3 days: user registration will be back online tomorrow, January 11.

User registration has now been re-enabled. The following changes were made:
- The settings for the CAPTCHA have been changed to "most secure." They were previously set at medium.
- Direct linking to the registration page is now impossible. To access it, you have to click to it by visiting YWS.
- All registrations are checked against the database at stopforumspam.com. Any IP addresses listed more than once on that site within the past two weeks will be unable to register.

Hopefully, that will do the trick, but they still won't prevent actual people from registering. There's a lot of companies out there that pay people to create fake registrations, and there's just no good defense against that except for email verification, which YWS already does.

What if someone uses a VPN? I know this is pretty late, but just pointing out.