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

Cool. Thanks for your work. :)

I suppose those text-based captchas should work for those with visual impairments as well, so that's good.

Thanks, sb!

Looks like a good plan!

Awesome, great work. Thanks again for keeping the best site on the net alive.

I'm glad the rash of spamming will finally be over :)

It seems a good solution. Thanks

Thanks!

Thanks!

Good job!

I have seen that the internal search engine also has a captcha now... any special reason for that?

Not only that, but the internal search engine CAPTCHA is way more complex and annoying than the "1st post after login" CAPTCHA.

Thanks sb. Much appreciated that you've chosen an approach that won't affect the BLF vibe.

It's mainly to prevent a malicious robot from hammering the server with search requests, which are fairly heavy on resources. I guess I could probably change that one to a math CAPTCHA.

To Admin/Mod

Job Well Done!

Why would someone hammer the internal search? What is achieved by that for them? They just would raise the server load. Wouldn't a time frame for max search sessions be more efficient to prevent that? Like 1 internal search every 30/60 secs max.

Test.

OK, officially confirming the canning of the first spammer on BLF since the new system was implemented. His name was "talk", and he is survived by 102,345,655 fellow spammers, who will be following him to BLF to meet the same fate.

He made his first post at 04:59, and his 11th and last post was at 05:11. At 05:04 he received his first hit, and the KO punch was made by the heavyweight champion "Raccoon City" at 05:12. The spammer received more hits after he was already down, which were probably made to clean up residual posts that he had already made. So notice that he stopped posting 12 minutes after starting, in which time he managed to make 11 posts, and his last post and his time of banning are only one minute apart, which suggests that he would have kept on posting if it weren't for the ban. I'm pretty happy with the results, especially considering that this occurred during one of the lower traffic times at BLF. What do you think?

Thanks for your efforts SB! Hope we can get back to normal!

-Garry

Outstanding! Thank you for your efforts.

Ah, relief at last, thank you!