Had to lock down registration...

[(TKC)-o]T3[o]

Our spam bot counter measures have been defeated and I'm sick of deleting users and posts. I have locked down registration so that only admins can enable new accounts. It will stay locked down until I can find new spam bot protection.

are we just using capcha? confirmation email should be enough though...

[(TKC)-o]T3[o]

No we aren't. We use Q&A.

[(TKC)-o]T3[o]

I'm trying a new Q&A of my own creation. We'll see if it's significantly complicated enough to stop the spam.. for now.

Lemme know how it goes, I may be able to think up some more ideas...

[(TKC)-o]T3[o]

I believe my new Q&A are working. I did have 3 new spam posts today but they were by bots that had registered previously. I then checked to see how many people had registered lately.. we had 100 bots, exactly, register on Dec 14th. I mass deleted them. I think we're good for now.

100 bots in one day, talk about a web-code feast...

Countermeasures... You make it sound like we are shooting flares and ECM off at incoming spam missiles! xD

[(TKC)-o]T3[o]

Countermeasures... You make it sound like we are shooting flares and ECM off at incoming spam missiles! xD

Yeah.. unfortunately that's kind of how it is.

What do the spam bots post?

[(TKC)-o]T3[o]

I don't know.. it's in russian.

I've dealt with spam bots before, usually the email confirmation will stop them because they use bogus email accounts when signing up. Sometimes bots will create topics, but usually just like to fill up your members lists

Well, you could just use captcha

Q&A.... What is my mom's name sounds right...lol jk

[(TKC)-o]T3[o]

captcha has been broken for years.. and we've been using email confirmation from the very start. That stuff doesn't work and hasn't for several years now (not for us anyway). The Q&A usually works for a while, then it gets broken and you have to increase the complexity and change the question format. We used to be able to say..

"This website is for clan TK_. Hint* Fill in the missing letter for the clan name."

And that worked for a while. Then we had to do something else, then change again and more recently we had..

"_+4=7"

That is now broken.

So now I changed it to something that might be too tough, but if you have half a brain you should be able to figure it out..

"i went to the BeAch and a Crab pinched my toe" (unscramble the uppercase letters. hint - taxi)

The answer of course.. "CAB".

That has stopped the bots.. but I noticed we haven't had anyone else register either. haha