What happened to the forum? > SPAM

[wesley123]

I just block the domains in my browser, a pretty simple solution. This actually causes these 'images' to not draw at all. Although markc's solution is a much effective one, this does the job atm

[mx_tifoso]

Those spam bots that just regurgitate posts are getting really annoying, and they usually make multiple posts. But at least now I've become better at recognizing and banning on the spot, then deleting everything.

And we really appreciate the reports, if it wasn't for them we wouldn't be able to react as fast sometimes. Thanks to all of you who help us out!

Cheers!

[bhall]

It's a spamstorm!

I'm actually kind of impressed by this one. It's hysterically absurd.

Perhaps registration should be suspended on race days.

[jon-mullen]

I don't get it, this one isn't even for stuff you can buy... And you can watch the NBA game for free on ESPN.com anyway...

[bhall]

At least it's honest this time around.

[Lycoming]

They did prove their captcha breaking code works.

[Steven]

The captcha questions are worth nothing anymore. We've recently tried to change them daily, but even then we have up to 20 spamuser registrations a day.

I did however create a spamfilter which works well, preventing suspicious posts from appearing before they were looked at by a moderator. Hundreds of posts have been filtered out like this, and we're also constantly adapting it after seeing new posts getting through.

In any case, it's important to report spamposts as soon as you see them, so they can be deleted quickly!

[piast9]

I just wonder how good would IQ-test-style questions work during registration

[wesley123]

Wouldnt a thing like for example solving a simple puzzle work?

I have seen on some forums where they for example take a puzzle, with one piece missing, giving the user a few options(obviously damn easy to solve) to complete the puzzle. Such diverse questions might be a possible answer to the problem. I also note such things are rather rare, compared to captcha which is used everywhere.

[Dragonfly]

There's an increased activity recently. In another local small forum of ours we had to block registering for a while as the hosting provider was not happy by massive e-mail notifications of new registrations. Different and more vulnerable engine though. I added a simple question in Bulgarian and it seems to work as the forum is intended for Bulgarians only. Or people knowing Bulgarian.

You can set a limit of post requiring moderator review before a user gets a full posting right. But this puts more load on the admin-mod team.
In a Russian forum they have implemented a plugin: If first post contains a link, the user is deleted automatically.