5 replies to this topic

[YzerFan19]

I'll be doing some work on the forums tonight, inspired by the fact that (as of right now) 53 attempted spammers have joined the boards in the last 16 hours.

There may be some downtime, I'll try to keep it all limited.

There will probably also be a forum user purge to go along with the upgrades.

[YzerFan19]

The forums are back online and are fully upgraded. We'll see if that helps.

All spammers from the last 24 hours have been deleted and blocked.

A second purge of unused accounts is underway.

[YzerFan19]

YzerFan19, on October 1 2008, 9:18 PM, said:

A second purge of unused accounts is underway.

This purge is complete. It was just a handful of people who had never posted, most of whom hadn't been back to the site since creating their account.

[YzerFan19]

Yesterday's upgrades didn't help much to stop spammers from signing up for the forums. Our second level of anti-spam measures stopped them from posting but I've implemented yet another anti-spam measure to stop them from being able to create accounts.

From now on, anyone signing up for an account here will have to answer a trivia question. It's not a hard one but it's one a spambot won't be able to answer on its own.

[YzerFan19]

Short-notice warning... The boards will be down for a few minutes shortly for another small upgrade.

Edit - 1:35 PM: The upgrade is complete. Our anti-spam registration trivia question has been removed as we are now using the reCaptcha anti-spam system, which should be stronger than the default forum system.

[Johnny Polaris]

Sorry to hear about the complete bastard spammers. However, I had to laugh at the word "spam" and secret triva question in the same context. "What is your favorite color?"

Maybe they'll shoot off across a ravine in a ball of flame if they answer wrong.

Keep up the good work.