Forum spambot problem?!

[silverlining]

Hi!
I've been having trouble with fake/spammy accounts registring at my forum lately. To try to prevent it I first added one of those turning number things, then changed the settings so that users have to activate their account via email. None of this helped. Now I have it set so that the admin, that being me, has to approve all new accounts but I don't quite like that partially cos it's a hassle for me to look through and also because the registering users don't get a chance to send a message and thus I can't know if they're idiots or people who actually wanna roleplay (this usually isn't a problem since we get very few members but I don't wanna risk it). Does anyone know what I can do to get rid of these annoying people?!

[Kiri]

Not really Emma. I have to approve all the members here - and mostly I look for real looking email addresses and filled in details. It's a pain, but fortunately we don't get that many here.

Sorry about the forumbot at your place.

Kiri

[silverlining]

Hmm, that's too bad. Hopefully the number of them will decrease eventually, cos i've noticed some of them having the same IPs or the same people registered at them or the same end of their email adresses so I will just have to ban as many IPs or email-endings as I can. If I really get fed up with it I can just turn registration off and have people contact me personally for an account. We get hardly any new members and the ones we do get are usually people I've chatted to personally and linked to the site so it's not a big deal.

[CharlieChomper]

That "feature" involving the numbers and letters, etc. is called a "captcha"--while they may deter some spam, as has been proven over the past year or so (if not possibly longer), they no longer stop it.

Even the most difficult and complex of them, as well as things like "click on the cats" in images variations have all been cracked especially within the last six months (the first of the major and known ones was Microsoft's, followed by Yahoo, and then the most recent being Google's--which was actually broken twice (they updated it to something that was even more complex and thought more difficult to therefore break and instead, it soon was added to the list of cracked captchas along with the old one).

If anyone has noticed a sudden increase in spam from free email providers, this is also the reason as to why.

Currently, there is now some debate within the industry on how best to now combat the spam problems and what new strategies to look into to try and do a better job at deterring it or else stopping it--so far, it seems to be more debate than results, however.

[silverlining]

Thanks for the info. I have turned my forum to "admin must approve all new members" and also banned a bunch of IPs and stuff that have been reoccuring, so the situation is under control again, more or less.