Topic: Spammers

[bustin98]

Ok, so I didn't look enough through the settings. I have turned on image verification and new accounts have to be authenticated by an admin.

[magicbay]

I think it's a good idea that ya've turned those settings on., Bustin98..

That will give all the admins the chance to approve or disapprove new accounts and govern all the old ones too..

[Maxim]

Admin approval sucks. CAPTCHA is broken. Take my advice, find a ReCAPTCHA mod, it's the only thing that works (apart from the admin approval), and even then you get some human signups.

[DarkWolf]

The only down side to reCaptcha is that lately I've noticed I have to generate several before I can get something legible.  But that's not too bad for things like registrations.

[Maxim]

Yeah, they need to scan more books But at least there is a reload button.

[bustin98]

Ok, I installed the reCaptcha system. We'll see how well it works.

[Peardian]

So it seems the system we have set up isn't very effective at keeping out spam. And wow, have we really been dealing with them for over two years?

[Revned]

It seems to me that the spammers are real people, which makes them quite a bit harder to stop.

[Will]

Real people? Hmm...In that case you might want to put that topic in the secret room, before spammers manipulate the information to their advantage. I wonder if those shoe and bikini adverts were copied off from somewhere. If I were accepting new members, I would test their interests and passion of gameplay, cartography or emulation like some sort of survey.

[Peardian]

This sounds promising. It basically checks a big list of known spammer IPs every time a user tries to join. If there's a hit, the user is blocked. Even though the thread was started in 2008, it still has recent activity. Think it's worth a shot?

[Revned]

That seems like it might help. We have so few legitimate new registrations that that's a good place to filter them.

[Trop]

They certainly are determined aren't they?  I'm with will, make em answer a mapping question.

[Revned]

I'd be wholeheartedly against something like that. I, for one, never would have joined the forum in the first place if I had to pass a personality test to get in. The only acceptable way to fight this to this is to filter against known spammer IPs, but even that isn't perfect.

[Peardian]

The filter is definitely worth a shot. The worst thing that could happen is that some legitimate user happens to have an IP on the list and can't get in. However, that's quite unlikely. And, if some spammers do manage to make it through, we can help contribute to the effort by reporting their IPs to the list.

[Revned]

New record! 7 of the 10 boards have spam on them right now!