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

Some bots can get past visual captchas like blurry text. Drupal seems to use particularly easy visual captchas of text, unlike re-captcha which at least changes all the time. There are drupal modules that can ask questions that should do the trick. We should be trying a few different ones until we find something that works.

Well, something has to be done. The board is getting all messed up. Participation will suffer if we don't get on top of it.

I volunteer to do whatever is asked of me.

almostFoy

Love the limit, working well, I've helped blast a few spammers before they have ruined more than a couple of threads :)

The limit on editing your own post afterwards is a pain tho. Most of my stuff needs correcting once or twice to make it nearly readable!

I don't get hit by the 1-minute rule very often, but it is usually on editing. It would be nice if it didn't apply to editing.

I'm glad to see spam way down and it is worth some small inconvenience. I haven't seen the board hit by 5 spammers at once, so I don't think it is likely the spammers will just increase the number of accounts in order to get around the 1-minute rule. That's just not how they are set up.

What he said .

^that doesn't sound good but are you using multiple accounts now?

So did your original account get deleted? I think sb can bring it back.

You've made a lot of posts. You should definitely get your original name back. I don't think established members should even be subject to deletion.

I'm sure SB will reinstate you, everyone knows you are a genuine member

There should be a safety for established members. When using a trackpad, I can accidentally click stuff by tapping instead of sliding. And people could accidentally mark someone as spam. Over enough time, you could build up the enough clicks to be deleted.

That would explain why I kept getting "user name or pass word not recognized". Maybe someone did not like my name (or poor punctuation). I was not aware of this. So, how many spam clicks does one have too get before they are "deleted"? So if I get this correctly if someone does not like (for whatever reason) you they can make you go "POOF"? BTW, IMO oldlumen"s idea sounds good. No?

Keith (I don"T like "POOF")

Hi everyone,
Gorann and all of his aliases are permanently banned now. He wasn’t banned by the anti-spam system but rather by me. He has been repeatedly and deliberately violating the simple rule of avoiding political commentaries here on BLF. He has received many warnings and has been temporarily banned prior to this, but he continues to cause problems. There are many other political and hate speech forums out there on the web, but BLF is not one of them.

Sorry wrong post...:(

Well, that explains that. Thanks for letting us know.

Actually, without going into details publicly, there are several different functions in place to protect against this happening. ;) I have been carefully monitoring the anti-spam hits since this new system was established, both for spammers and from users who mark spam posts, and so far so good. It's a pretty robust system that automatically corrects some common mistakes like those that brted mentions, and it also protects against malicious users who try to abuse the system. Thanks again to all of our vigilant users who help control spam. As for abuse of other sorts, such as the recent case of goran*, please keep in mind that the anti-spam system is NOT to be used for this sort of complaint against a user that you don't like. Rather, in most cases, it is best to simply ignore users that you don't like. In the rare case that a user repeatedly and maliciously violates the BLF rules, please contact me personally via PM. Thanks! Have fun.

Most of us don't have any control over what our government does . We simply try to get along .

You can check with kreisler, I think 'dinoboy' is available now....

+1

Well said, jack!

How do other forums get around the spam problem?