Spam!?

[CanadianWolvie]

Warbird, the forums haven't been around long, give it time for this place to turn into a zoo as well

[Silemess]

I have to laugh that I went from being a lurker to joining the forums because of the spam thread, but:

Warbird's suggestion of an e-mail validation is right on the money. Captchas and the like are unfortunately broken lock outs. They can do some filtering, but not with the success that they used to have. E-mail validation is more labor intensive, but it can serve to weed out a few more bots. They are looking for the easy pay off, raising the bar will drive off a good portion of them but not all.

Another idea is to have an approval period for a poster's first post (or first X posts). Unfortunately, it's been a few years since I last had to deal with a bbs, so I'm afraid I don't have any direct suggestions that would trim down the labor on it.

The module I was familiar with had a /white list/black list/review/ function. The obvious posts allowed you to toss the user into one list or the other. But when you had the lackluster "maybe human, maybe faking" posts, you approved this comment but left the poster flagged that their next post would require checking before it went to the board. But again, it was labor intensive and did _not_ scale well as the forum's population grew and thus # of new members increased as well.

[burningmercury]

just had to post the spam quota has just shot off the scale since this morning

[Warbird]

I know, right? Makes me nostalgic. I'm sure the mods will get right on it.

[Snake Plissken]

I know, right? Makes me nostalgic. I'm sure the mods will get right on it.

odd...10 hours and its still there. Normally its gone within an hour.

[Stelly]

sorry sorry, had a few things to do offline, happens once a year

Stelly

[Qhesz]

Yeah, looks like the spam bots are teleporting right onto the forum deck. (Had to make an FTL-related metaphor )

I assume that means they're getting around the current captcha systems to create an account. So I followed the phpBB link at the bottom of the page, cruised around a bit, and found http://www.phpbb.com/customise/db/mod/s ... ha_plugin/. Claims to be easy to install and effective.
ps. I probably don't have a clue what I'm talking about, but I hope I'm being helpful. Otherwise it's just interesting to see what novel ways people come up with to thwart spambots.

[Stelly]

Yer I was looking at that one and maybe a Q&A captcha as well... need to discuss it with Matt and Justin.

Stelly

[USAgent]

I was also thinking that any spam that surfaces might be accounts that were created prior to our anti-spam efforts that didn't post yet. Like little timebombs in hiding... bastards.

[Warbird]

Like little timebombs in hiding... bastards.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TO5wryDdEI0