Spam

[Andy Price]

The forum is so full of spam these days that it's getting hard to read. I just came back after a few hours away and found 4 pages of posts with only a handful of valid ones scattered amongst them. I know that someone labours away in the background on our behalf deleting them, but I wonder if it's time to beef up the preventative measures?
Andy

[stretchedthin]

You are right Andy.  I think Vec is looking into getting one of those recognize the letters and numbers in the picture thingy's added to the new member sign in.

[MikeCindi]

Is this as big an issue for other distro sites? I don't go to many others (ClearOS is pretty much the only one as I use that OS for my server). I don't notice any spam posts on that forum. Here it seems to happen several times a week.

[M0E-lnx]

Is this as big an issue for other distro sites? I don't go to many others (ClearOS is pretty much the only one as I use that OS for my server). I don't notice any spam posts on that forum. Here it seems to happen several times a week.

There are several good solutions to avoid this... the people that host the forum for us are working on getting ours fixed.

[roarde]

A BSD forum I enjoy is almost spam-free. I mention this one because; in variety of users, attractiveness to spammers, and available time of the moderators and admins; it's the closest comparison to here I know of. These limitations are placed on new users:

    * Unable to post links.
    * Unable to post any images.
    * Unable to use signatures.
    * Unable to edit posts.
    * No access to some features like social groups, albums, PM, email users, etc.

After 5 days or five posts the restrictions go away. A couple of our spammers have shown a lot of patience and a willingness to do work by hand, so more checking than five days/posts might be necessary here. Some details on daemonforums' policy are here. Please don't contact that poster with forum-related questions, he's since retired after long service. A post to the proper forum would almost definitely get help in this regard from his successors or so. If an admin here would like, I'd do the initial legwork to put you in touch if you prefer.

I don't like the idea of more hassles for new users; new-user-friendliness is one of the things VL forums are rightly known for. But it seems necessary and worth the trade-off, if it's explained when signing up. Not long since I was a new user at daemonforums and had to post a URL to make my meaning clear. No problem -- just posted in in plain text and was easily understood. It's just not spammer-friendly, which is the idea.

I've seen a simpler, lower-bandwidth "captcha" than Captcha. Don't know how it's done, but I can find out if an admin requests.

[stretchedthin]

roarde good tips, we need to do something about this. It's getting tiresome.

[retired1af]

CAPTCHA is pretty worthless at this point. Bots can read the image now, and the more difficult ones are flagged for human intervention.

I, too, have set restrictions on the forums I run. New users aren't allowed to use PMs or signatures. Only I know the magic number of posts needed to lift those restrictions.

A better registration block is a question and answer routine. Bots can't answer a question, and for the few humans that get through, they can be nailed easily enough.