Spammers

[falcor]

Why not make the registration of new users more difficult so you dont have to deal with 10 new spam posts every night?

[Piledriver]

Why not make the registration of new users more difficult so you dont have to deal with 10 new spam posts every night?

Because he might have to deal with 20 real people trying to sign up instead.

Some sites have a test of a nontrivial (but Google-able) topic-related question.
Sometmes the trick is to ask for the wrong answer, indirectly.

The people who write the spambots are, for god knows what reason, persistent.

[Bonemaro]

I don't remember, but does this site require you to verify with your email address prior to being able to post? I was getting a ton of spam on my forum and had to implement that. It actually got rid of most of it. I get 4 or 5 notifications a day of "User BobX65432358 has joined," but they never come out of Awaiting User Authorization status.

I also set it up so that new users have to have at least 5 posts before then can publish a post containing a link. Any posts prior to 5 with links go into a moderated state that only I and my lead moderator can see. The system works well. I still get the occasional spam post, but nowhere near what it was.

[doc]

this last couple of days, the spam has been abnormally high, yesterday particularly. AdminSteve figured it out. We hadn't changed our signup question and answer list for a while. The spammers figure it out, then they're in. Steve changed the questions. It'll settle down now.

Must have valid email to sign up, but anyone can get a hotmail/gmail address in 2 minutes. The second idea is a good one, I think. 5 posts before posting a link. Will put this in my hip pocket.

It is always a balance between making it easy on legit users and tough on spammers. We do what we can.

doc

[fusername]

yeah, the no links before a certain number of posts thing has cropped up on a lot of forums. Makes plenty of sense to me. Good luck and thanks for all the hard work.

[Chip Birks]

Came out in force today. Almost 2 full pages of "new posts". 2 user names.

[doc]

Every day. Never stops.

doc

[BAJA-IT]

Looks like we just got spammed!!

[Chip Birks]

8 pages of new posts in 3 hours!!!!

[Leatherneck]

this last couple of days, the spam has been abnormally high, yesterday particularly. AdminSteve figured it out. We hadn't changed our signup question and answer list for a while. The spammers figure it out, then they're in. Steve changed the questions. It'll settle down now.

Must have valid email to sign up, but anyone can get a hotmail/gmail address in 2 minutes. The second idea is a good one, I think. 5 posts before posting a link. Will put this in my hip pocket.

It is always a balance between making it easy on legit users and tough on spammers. We do what we can.

doc

Good idea on the post min for a link. Most won't mind as STF is the only important link anyway. Doc you and Adminsteve are doing a great job. Thank you for putting up with us!

[Chip Birks]

Nice of the spammer to post in the appropriate topic

[H2OSB]

Make it 20 or 25 posts before anyone can post a link. That ought to discourage those idiots. They may be persistent, but that would take a lot of work just to spam some p**n sites.

H2OSB

[Chip Birks]

We are getting blasted again.

[Chip Birks]

Looks like the update didnt address spammer access. Is there anything that can be done about it?

[Ol'fogasaurus]

It takes some people longer to grow up than others. Just because you get older it doesn't mean you grow up too.

Someday someone is going to screw with them and you will hear some big time sqeeking from them fogetting what jerks they are/were. I've seen it happen so many times....