Posts In Here May Accidentally Get Deleted Along With The Spam

[BrandonK]

Please keep in mind this forum has the SAME RULES that apply to all of the others. I've seen a lot of spam being reported from this forum. Please keep in mind that SPAM IS STRICTLY FORBIDDEN in ANY forum.

Thank you for your cooperation!

[mantisinc]

And I can tell you now it is not just this forum!
I have been running an insect realted forum now for about a year, and haven't really had a problem with spam. However, the past few months has been awful for spam. I have been deleting up to 9 user accounts each day, which ahve just been posting inappropriate, and vulgar content. What's more, is that they are getting through the image, and email verification system.
How does this work? Do you know if they are actually PEOPLE signing up, or just very good bots?
Thanks in advance!

[areidmtm]

And I can tell you now it is not just this forum!
I have been running an insect realted forum now for about a year, and haven't really had a problem with spam. However, the past few months has been awful for spam. I have been deleting up to 9 user accounts each day, which ahve just been posting inappropriate, and vulgar content. What's more, is that they are getting through the image, and email verification system.
How does this work? Do you know if they are actually PEOPLE signing up, or just very good bots?
Thanks in advance!

That's what I face too. It's not just bots anymore. It's sick people that have nothing better to do. They get paid on home many click they can get. So no verification method's really work that well anymore.

[redsox9]

That's what I face too. It's not just bots anymore. It's sick people that have nothing better to do. They get paid on home many click they can get. So no verification method's really work that well anymore.

Is it possible to require verification from an administrator before allowing posts? Or maybe not allowing a user to post a new topic until after they've made X number of posts?

[areidmtm]

Is it possible to require verification from an administrator before allowing posts? Or maybe not allowing a user to post a new topic until after they've made X number of posts?

The whole point of the board was for users to easily ask new questions and get awnsers to them faster. Having them play the spam proof games would be too frustration to most end users. I know it would be for me. So I just deal with all the crap that comes threw and delete it and ban the user.

[redsox9]

The whole point of the board was for users to easily ask new questions and get awnsers to them faster. Having them play the spam proof games would be too frustration to most end users. I know it would be for me. So I just deal with all the crap that comes threw and delete it and ban the user.

It was a year ago that I joined this forum so I don't remember exactly what the process was, but is there some form of email verification process? What is it?

[areidmtm]

It was a year ago that I joined this forum so I don't remember exactly what the process was, but is there some form of email verification process? What is it?

New users have to have a valid email address and have to click the link in the email to enable the account.

[geodosch]

I was looking for something else, but happened to see this thread, so I thought I'd add my $0.02...

I have a Guestbook on my site. At first I'd get the occasional spam posting, but about a year ago they began getting more frequent, until I was seeing 15-20 per day. So I added a Captcha verification, and they immediately went down to almost zero, and within a couple of weeks stopped completely (my guess is that the ones who would bother manually making the entries stopped as soon as they realized they couldn't automate it anymore.)

The site where my guestbook resides is extremely low-traffic-- I did it as an exercise for work that I use elsewhere. So any spam that gets posted isn't really accomplishing anything. I get the feeling that the spammers do it as more of a challenge, seeing how many automated posts they can create on as many sites as they can.

If you're interested, Google "captcha". I was quickly able to modify my perl cgi scripts to use it.

[areidmtm]

The problem now with captcha, is that there are now bots that will essentially do an OCR and read the captcha. With as much traffic as this forum gets, there really isn't a good way around it. There is always going to be spam. Besides, I really don't see "too" much spam. In the mornings is when I see the most. I just delete it. No big deal.

[thebeard]

Moderating a forum is a daily task. I had a forum using phpbb for students that I finally just took down because I couldn't keep up with the constant entries...around the clock. And yes, it appeared they were humanoid, and sick.

[chufuong]

The whole point of the board was for users to easily ask new questions and get awnsers to them faster. Having them play the spam proof games would be too frustration to most end users. I know it would be for me. So I just deal with all the crap that comes threw and delete it and ban the user.

True.

a) people wouldn't ask questions needed answered for them to get servers
or
b) people would email all their questions to them directly, which would be annoying for things other members of the forum could answer instead.