[08-Mar-2012] New SPAM mitigation scheme in place

Damnit, I missed the bloodbath!

Good job guys!

ty very much mister admin!

Time to make the math equations harder?

I still say add handbag to the list of swear words...that would have broken half the links in that last post

I wonder if they will eventually avoid us, since their posts disappear, or if there are so many that they'll never notice....

This is not working. 3 major spam attacks last night. We can stop them within 10-20 minutes, but they can get 100 posts in before enough people mark them. There needs to be a stronger barrier up front.

I don't know if it would be possible, but I saw one forum where they had a CAPTCHA of blurry text, but the instructions said to ignore the CAPTCHA and just enter the word human. Or something like that. Even if spammers are using humans to register, they probably don't speak English, so simple questions are better than blurry text or math.

simple questions for flashaholics, not just general simple questions. something like "which is d. chow's company? (***rs****s)"

That might be too hard even for "legal" newbies.

If you just tell them what to put in the blank, you could let the bots hammer away at the CAPTCHA and they'd never get it right.

Alternatively you could ask really, really simple questions like What does the B in BLF stand for.

budget

budgets

:D i win!

I don't think the CAPTCHA was working a few hours ago. I posted twice and either I ignored it or did not see the math question, but my comments were still posted. I do see it now though and it is working.

We sure did get hammered this morning! Everything is all out of whack and recent posts from last night are literally burried in pages of old posts. I hope Sb can put everything back in order for us.

That's what always happens to me (no CAPTCHA), as I have the BLF cookie set to 'protected' (i. e. never to be deleted), so that I don't need to log-in every time I return to this forum.

what about do a golpe and elect kreisler as new admin? he is so active to block the spam first that the bots to their dirty job xD

joking ur job is really appreciated sb, ty :)

golpe? you mean coup d'eta? i am always asleep when the spammer do their attacks. missed them all. when i wake up at noon :D all spammers already killed. and it looks that you guys had a lotta fun counter attacking them.

:)

Regarding the math question: instead of being asked one time every session wouldn't it be better to get a question lets say every 10th post? This way the robots probably will come to a halt and the manual spammer will get slowed down.

Since most of us don't make more than 10 posts a day the hassle for the average user should be minimal.

Just a thought...

One CAPTCHA per every 10 posts sounds like a good idea to me.

I guess they would be clever enough to set their robots once they learn on how the CAPTCHA works. 10 posts or X posts does not matter . We should bring in some randomness to halt the loop.

Cap posting at say five posts in any ten minutes, no one really needs to post more than that and it gives everybody a chance to kick the spammer before the whole board gets messed up...

5 Posts Per 10 Min. sounds like a Plan.

Lower the number to kick someone out to 2 people that have "marked as spam". As far as CAPTCHA goes, it doesn't seem to be working. Sooner or later, the realization has to come that to not allowing newbies to post, till their first 3 are approved. That stops the bots from hitting the forums, but it might drive a moderator crazy. Yes, sooner or later, it looks like someone has to be a mod. Also, maybe the automatic feature of becoming a new member needs to be shut down and make it so a new person has to send an email asking to be approved, to become one.

It's all a hassle, but so is all this spamming going on. Is it better to be a hassle for a newbie, or for a mod, or is it better to drive the members nuts every day/night?