Spam, spam, spam...

[SeanF-SKO]

270 new spammer accounts created on Monday 3/18. What is going on?

 

[somewhereinusa]

Evidently they must have had a good weekend. I would say the weather must have been bad, but I doubt that they venture outside much anyway.
Keep up the good work. Glad they don't get far enough for us to see.

 

[91 Bus Guy]

With that many spammers,it must be a difficult job to find the legit applicants and allow them through. I now understand why some email accounts are not allowed.

Thank you, to the Mods that keep us insulated from all the spam.

Keith

 

[Diesel Dan]

Yeah, thanks guys for the work you do to keep this forum clean!

 

[freakn]

1285 spam so far today, thanks to the other mods for doing a great job.

 

[freakn]

Make that 1312 so far. argh

 

[SeanF-SKO]

All of those spammers wanting to be here must mean that Skoolie.net is getting more and more popular! I wonder if they would go away if they knew just how broke most of us are?

Rich

Haha, true! But seriously, all of the spam activity, from account creation to the (attempted) creation of new topics and posts, is 100% automated. And most of it originates from IP addresses in China.

 

[freakn]

903 already...going be a long day

 

[GreyEagle-SKO]

members 9093 and growing daily

 

[GreyEagle-SKO]

Maybe......... But approval of membership before post would be even better.........
just my 2 cents.......

 

[lornaschinske]

Just curious, but would charging a $1 fee to become a member cut down on the spammers? It would also help to confirm identity.

Rich

I'm too cheap... FRUGAL... to pay a Dollar!

And I hate the "capcha" thingys. I keep getting the ones that I can't read. The "letters" are bad enough but the pictures are always so fuzzy that I have to guess at what they say. I have to make several guesses.

There has to be a better (and simple) way to determine a human as opposed to a bot.

 

[SeanF-SKO]

And I hate the "capcha" thingys. I keep getting the ones that I can't read. The "letters" are bad enough but the pictures are always so fuzzy that I have to guess at what they say. I have to make several guesses.

There has to be a better (and simple) way to determine a human as opposed to a bot.

Agree, the captcha security stuff is super annoying.

A fairly simple way (I think) would be to construct a challenge/response question that is not easy for a non-human/script/bot to answer, i.e. "Enter the non-lower case letters from 'd6Tyr#Km9@bP' "

 

[lornaschinske]

That sounds pretty simple. I hate jumping thru hoops simply to post a comment on something. I have discovered that I'm not as patient as I used to be. Old age?

 

[the_experience03]

Approval of membership before posting might be worthwhile. After all, the spammers are only posting once under each name and we deny those anyway so it's not like it would be more work on the moderation end. My only fear is that we could possibly discourage someone from posting or joining. Nevertheless, www.tnttt.com is very actve and has a set up that requires individual membership approval. Maybe that's a way to go?

 

[SeanF-SKO]

Hmm...I just looked at the registration screen and there is a challenge question similar to 'Enter the first four and last three chars of '3ryo2uhdfjh38jb'

I wouldn't be surprised if they'd come up with a program to figure it out.

Maybe something more challenging...like
'What color is the middle item: AppleWrenchSchoolbusPolarbearSky"

 

[SeanF-SKO]

Approval of membership before posting might be worthwhile. After all, the spammers are only posting once under each name and we deny those anyway so it's not like it would be more work on the moderation end. My only fear is that we could possibly discourage someone from posting or joining. Nevertheless, http://www.tnttt.com is very actve and has a set up that requires individual membership approval. Maybe that's a way to go?

Slight correction...our spammers post (or attempt to post) multiple times. I just checked a random one and the account was created last month. And 'he' had several posts in the moderation queue.

Agree that individual account approval may be the way forward.

 

[100mpg]

I hate to say it but it is the software that allows them to get through. I had so many spammers on my site with the free PHPBB software I had to take it down! I could not afford Vbulletin
I could not stop them.

 

[SeanF-SKO]

I hate to say it but it is the software that allows them to get through. I had so many spammers on my site with the free PHPBB software I had to take it down! I could not afford Vbulletin
I could not stop them.

Damn. Maybe Steve could get donations to offset the cost of vBulletin. I would hate to lose this place to spambot zombies.

 

[91 Bus Guy]

I had an idea that this site was popular, but, never figured it was that good! If only there was a better way to weed out all of the spammers.

Thanks goes out to all the mods that take care of us and keep the spam off.

Keith

 

[lornaschinske]

Maybe a "rule" that the user name has to include an actual word? Seems the spammers use gibberish names. Of course I have no clue as to what I am talking about either.