Membership Crosscheck

From PluginWiki

The plugin can check your group's membership against the membership list of other groups - the theory being that someone who is a member of multiple groups a long way apart may be a spammer or harvesting email addresses. A typical example would be that the Scarborough group would not expect to have anyone who is also a member of the Edinburgh group.

There are two ways to check:-

1. If you want to run this check manually, on a 'one-off' basis, then you need to follow the instructions on the Bulk Operations#Membership_Cross-Check page.
2. If you want to run this check check automatically at regular intervals, keep reading this page for how to set up this automatic process.

NOTE: This is different from the function which uses a Spammer List - though you can use this function to identify people who should go on that list, and it's best to use the two together.

Be Careful

Remember that there's the possibility that people may have valid reasons for being members of multiple groups - for example, they may have family in different locations. The plugin doesn't do anything to verify that the member is actually a spammer. So the final responsibility for removing a member from your group rests with you as the moderator.

Configuring Checking

You configure this from the page that opens if you click the following button on the Checking tab:

You'll see this:

You configure two things:

• The URLs of the groups to check. Separate multiple groups using a semicolon.
  • These should be the full URL without the Messages or Pending part, e.g. http://groups.yahoo.com/group/EdinburghFreegle. Don't put 'members' on the end. No trailing slash.
  • You'll need to have moderator rights on these groups to access the membership list, so you'll need to reach agreement with moderators (e.g. via your modsquad).
• The number of hours between checks, defaulting to 1. 0 means check each time you load a page - which is slow, but useful for testing.

The plugin will then periodically check the membership lists against your group's members. If any match, you'll get one or more popups like this:

You can then either click OK to remove the member from your own group, or Cancel to leave the member in place.

Remember that if you remove the member, then they will no longer be on both groups - which means that they might not show up in any checks done by that group, so the owners of that group won't be told about them. So please get the member added to the Spammer List. Send their email address (not the Yahoo id) to Rebecca, including:

• The groups they were present on
• Your Yahoo ID
• The date

It will then be added to the spam list. Thank you.

(Remember we need to be able to read the member's full email address, so you may need to insert a space before and after the @ symbol to get all the address visible.)

If you click Cancel, then you'll see this:

This allows you not to be bothered about this member again.