Stop the spammers!

[haddock]

Hi folks,

It seems too easy for the site to be spoilt by spam; would it not be possible to impose a 24 hour post registration posting delay, or email checking, or both? It must cost something just to clear it up!

[homburg]

Hi haddock,

You're right, there is a constantly growing number of spammers who try to register a forum account. It looks like they found a way to override smf's standard captcha method. Although nearly 99% is blocked by our anti spam extensions some of the spammers still pass the registration process. Email checking is currently enabled, a posting delay does not exist since we think this is an unnecessary barrier, especially when users want to report urgent problems. In order to stop the spammers I installed a more advanced captcha method, let's see if this helps.

Cheers,
    Helge

[haddock]

Hi there Helge,

Thanks for your reply, we're not the only ones, and it is only going to get worse; but all is not lost!!

http://www.simplemachines.org/community/index.php?topic=452752.0

I loved the idea that the moderator has to approve the first post, and loved the reference to folks being paid to visually de-captcha.

[homburg]

Hi haddock,

Thanks for the link! Unfortunately it shows that nearly everything that we could do against forum spammers has so far been done. But maybe you're right with the idea of an admin manually approving each user registration. If we do some outsourcing this may lead to an interesting kind of business model: the same guy who is paied to visually solve our captcha can later reject his own registration attempt...  

Cheers,
Helge

[haddock]

I like your thinking  ,