Anti-spam..

[(TKC)-o]T3[o]

Starting a couple of days ago we started getting hit by spam bots again. Apparently they had broken our Q&A that we use to try to prevent spam so I have changed the type of questions asked and we will see if that is good enough to stop the spam. If not, I will do something else in an effort to keep the bots out.

I know most of you can't see the spam, that is because posts by newly registered users goes into an approval queue, but believe me, they have been hitting us forcing me to delete users and posts. Let's hope my efforts prove fruitful, if not, I will come up with something more complex and harder to crack.

For the curious, here is an example of the type of challenge question you will be asked to answer if you were to register a new forum account.

What are the first three and last three characters of pra2@j$4&f

i been wondering this as well. i have been disapproving alot of them

[(TKC)-o]T3[o]

Since Jan 1 we had been getting many new users every day, most were never activated, many where, but they were obviously spam bots. On Jan 11 when I implemented the new Q&A challenge questions, the new user registrations stopped. I thought, after coming to the forums just a little while ago for the first time since the 11th, that it hadn't worked because there were about 10 new posts by spam bots, but those posts were by bots that were already registered before I added the new challenge questions for registration. So, I went to the members list and saw that every single new member who had registered since Jan 1, except for one, was a spam bot so I deleted all those users and removed any posts that might of been made by them. I believe we are now, once again, spam free.

At some point they will probably be able to bypass our new Q&A registration questions, they always do, but once again we will update our anti-spam counter measures and will beat them. Until then, we're all good.