Forum spam

[Vince-0]

There has been a huge increase in spammed topics and replies in the forum lately. Is there something that can be done about it EG: CAPTCHA etc?

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Vin

[mflorell]

Every time we put up a new authentication method they find a way around it. Remember that most of these are actual humans being paid pennies per hour to post spam on random forums. The filters are actually working pretty well, the spam reports in PHPbb show over 100 spam accounts are being deleted every day on this forum, what you are seeing is actually a very small number that make it through.

The only way to guarantee no spam is to change the forums to read-only for unapproved users, and require people who want to post to be verified by a person on our end before they are given an account that is allowed to post, and I haven't wanted to close the community up like that.

[Vince-0]

Good point on open community. I guess it just means a bit more manual clean up.
Thanks Matt

[williamconley]

I like it this way. Keeps the newbies able to jump on and ask for help without "approval". A little spam never killed anybody. Unless it was in a 55Gallon drum at Sam's Club.

[Acidshock]

yeah CAPTCHA doesnt do too much. People just use services like decaptcher or deathbycaptcha. Buy 1000 decaptchas for a dollar. Heard about one group that had created a ton of free porn sites and then had people have to enter a captcha code before they got to see it. Then what they would do is have their program relay the captcha image to the user and have them solve the captcha image for them. It was quite ingenious. Only one I have seen that has not quite been attacked yet is the 3d visual image captchas such as kittenauth.