The Spam Situation

[admin]

Thanks for your patience as we work through the spam problem. I appreciate the discipline shown by our guests by ignoring and not replying to spam.

For every spam message you see, TEN items get posted to our calendar, but since I moderate calendar posts, nobody but me is bothered.

We barred certain text strings from being part of User IDs (eg Viagra, Casino) which helped with spammer registrations a lot. Lately the scum have been registering with random letter string names for IDs. I'm told these are NOT robots, but third worlders - working for the spammers at slave wages - who can get past the garbled text verification that's supposed to stop robots.

To slow them down I have added one more verification step to registration which is to type the first letter of the company that sponsors this forum.

Shortly I will upgrade to a new version of the forum system which allows easier banning and even more robust yet painless registration filtering.

In the meantime I do check in here daily to pare away the spam. Thanks again for your patience.

-Ron Low
TLCTugger.com

[cloud7]

a good technique (I would think) that I have seen is a sanity test question like what is four minus 6 as most spambots won't be able to decipher that, I think it's enabled by requiring a password and then changing the password field to be the sanity check

[Joseph]

MySpace makes people have to type from a 6 letter sequence they have to visually read.

Perhaps if the boards employed something like that?

I gotta say, hate to open up a message that looks important and all of a sudden it's just a mosaic of fake mutilated cocks, and I'm supposed to be turned on by that.

[admin]

The extra registration question has worked wonders, cutting the number of nuiscance registrations from 30/day to almost zero. I hope legit seekers are getting through to us. There are sections of this board they can post in for help if they can't get registered, assuming they are tenacious.

>> MySpace makes people have to type from a 6 letter sequence they have to visually read. <<

We had already used the scrambled text that had to be visually matched. It was malicious PEOPLE getting past that hurdle.


-Ron

[anon-ExMember]

it's a captcha code

[admin]

PLEASE DO NOT post replies to bad stuff. This only wastes the time of others who may be fooled - by the indicator that says there are replies posted - into clicking and reading the time-wasting message.

When you see something that doesn't belong on the forum, please click the red triangle symbol near the uppper right of the offending message to alert the moderators who will delete the bad posting. Generally this is only necessary if it's still there a day after you first spot it, since I check in daily (especially in the sections where non-members are able to post).

Thanks for your help,
-Ron

[admin]

I got a bunch of complaints about my cryptic spambot question on the registration screen, and I have to agree it was probably mostly keeping out non-English speakers. So I removed it and IMMEDIATELY was saw a huge influx of nuiscance postings.

So I've put back a simpler question. Let me know if you hear of anyone having trouble signing up.

-Ron
847 414-1692