SPAM and THANKYOUS.

[Ian Price]

As some of you may have noticed spam posts are getting increasingly common - each morning I typically delete  a number of spam posts  - I'm sure the other Mods and Admins do the same too. This morning for instance I spent several minutes playing catch-up with one spam poster that was posting new crap as quickly as I could remove it.

I'd like to say a big thankyou to everyone that takes the time to report spam posts. Your posts help to identify the crap. Your reports help reduce uncertainty when removing posts; some spam is very obvious other stuff is pretty subtly. So cheers; you help make the forums a cleaner and greener place to visit and make it easier for Mods and Admins to do our job.

I try to spend 24 hours a day on the forums, but due to real life getting in the way I can't So your help is very much appreciated. keep up the good work.

[Kitty Hello]

Yes, I also want to thank you all for deleting the crap and providing bans. I try to be 24/7 on this forum, too, but there's these bug reports you always mention... XD

[Ian Price]

Cheers Gernot. Now get back to work on fixing those bugs!

Seriously, it's all because of your hard work Gernot that any of us are here, and want to stay

[Kitty Hello]

I also installed http://custom.simplemachines.org/mods/index.php?mod=2182 this now. I hope it might help a bit. I heard about spammers form poor countries, where they place real people solving captchas for (no) money.

[ampos]

Cheers Gernot. Now get back to work on fixing those bugs!

And start with the Wii port!

[MrTAToad]

I'd like to say a big thankyou to everyone that takes the time to report spam post

No problem!

[XanthorXIII]

Thank you mods for making this a clean and enjoyable environment. In fact, come to think of it I have not seen one shred of spam which is freaking awesome.

[MrTAToad]

There was a bit around 2am yesterday - I was busy reporting some to the moderators, as I had nothing else to do

[LineOf7s]

Oh.

There's been a couple of days over the last week or so where I've seen a metric ton of spam on the forums, and all I did was say "Bloody spam - I'm sure the moderators will get right onto that as soon as they wake up".  Only because of this thread did I notice the "Report To Moderator" link.

Oops.  Sorry about that.  Will do better. 

[Ian Price]

There was a bit around 2am yesterday - I was busy reporting some to the moderators, as I had nothing else to do

I was around then too - but I was at work. Why weren't you asleep?

[MrTAToad]

Mainly because I was busy watching some Zero Punctuation videos

[bigsofty]

Thank you and the other mods Ian, it's a pain in the ass job... Nothing worse than settling down to poke about the forum and spending the first 20 minutes, deleting bot crap. Keep up the good work! 

Having modded a lot of forums myself in the past, the best anti spam method I found was not captcha or any other complex plug in but a simple random logic question. Bots do not know how to handle them, when they try to auto-register.

For example...

"What us the first name of the developer of GLBasic?"
Answer
"Gernot"

Simple, it can't be coded, it's 99% effective and nit intrusive fir new users.

Simple random maths works well too...

"3*11=" ?

This can be coded around but it filters out 75% of bots all the same.

Cheers,


Ian

[Kitty Hello]

logic question is hard for multilanguage support.

[MrTAToad]

Perhaps mathematical ones would work ?

[Ian Price]

I really hate Captchas, they are even worse when they have shite graphics - they are usually very hard to distinguish - is that an "O" (oh) or a "0" (zero). And is that "I" (eye) or "l" (ell)?

A simple maths function could be good, however most of the spam I've seen lately appears to be human generated - (albeit cut&paste crap) they even add avatars and signatures. Nothing you do will stop them from registering.