The fight against Spam
Posted: November 17th, 2012, 6:18 pm
When setting up a bulletin board, it's wise to set it up so that managment tasks are kept to a minimum.
When I set this board up, I enabled Captcha so that new users could register themselves and not have to wait for approval. This was done by the board asking them a general question to which an answer was needed. This is often a better approach than simply entering in some shaky text from an obscure image, which is easily defeated by most spam bots. This is also a method which has been used for some time successfully.
Till now.
Seems the bots have grown a bit smarter and have bombarded our board with a few hundred new user accounts to which some have been used to spam us.
Acting upon the advice of our moderators, I have reverted back to a manual user approval method for now, until I can determine how best to upgrade our Captcha. I have also pruned the few hundred users which registered after November 14th and their posts.
Many thanks go to Mix and Neo for their efforts battling this annoyance. You guys are my eyes and ears, and I'm sorry my vacation kept me from you for as long as it did, but you've done great work here and it's very much appreciated!
More info to come as it becomes available to me.
Best,
Mark
When I set this board up, I enabled Captcha so that new users could register themselves and not have to wait for approval. This was done by the board asking them a general question to which an answer was needed. This is often a better approach than simply entering in some shaky text from an obscure image, which is easily defeated by most spam bots. This is also a method which has been used for some time successfully.
Till now.
Seems the bots have grown a bit smarter and have bombarded our board with a few hundred new user accounts to which some have been used to spam us.
Acting upon the advice of our moderators, I have reverted back to a manual user approval method for now, until I can determine how best to upgrade our Captcha. I have also pruned the few hundred users which registered after November 14th and their posts.
Many thanks go to Mix and Neo for their efforts battling this annoyance. You guys are my eyes and ears, and I'm sorry my vacation kept me from you for as long as it did, but you've done great work here and it's very much appreciated!
More info to come as it becomes available to me.
Best,
Mark