See: all the absurd spam in the General forum. We've apparently hit some sort of popularity threshold wherein the spammers think we're a good target now.
Yep, I guess it's something like that -- I'm not sure why, but we went from just about no spam to tons of it seemingly overnight.
It looks like the spammers and scammers have managed to get into the forums and are trolling around for victims errrr..... I mean customers.
Like, a moderator? Like, the same guy that's supposed to remove that crap? Gaslamp: You really need a few European moderators, too, to prevent something like this happening.
I'm all for a captcha too. Or better yet, for something akin to a riddle (an easy one) or just a minor math problem to solve, as that would make it harder for both bots and people who don't think at all (not that I'm discriminating against potential forum members, but if someone is stupid enough not to be able to count to 10 despite being an adult, I do not want him/her to be here) to join.
Captchas can be OCR'd. Read up on XRumer. A custom challenge (eg. "what kind of lamp?") may yield better results. However, consider the possibility of human-aided spam account registration. The account confirmation e-mail is based on a default template. A bot can simply follow the link. Breaking up the link into pieces helps against bots (eg. "go to this url, then paste the following in the adress bar"). Unfortunately it also increases the number of failures of legit registrations. The resulting complaints in your inbox will be at least as annoying. One suggestion I've found is to have a script count the number of keystrokes. Could prove to be incompatible with password management software however. XRumer fills in all form fields. You could try to add a hidden form field. If the field is not blank, the form must have been submitted by a bot. However I'd not be surprised if this crude detection method has been beaten by now. Although XRumer is able to solve them, from my own experience Captchas are still useful in blocking registration attempts by simpler bots right at the gate. Depending on the forum software and configuration, stopping the bulk of the spam attacks saves a lot of moderation alerts and warnings about unsuccessful registrations.
Moderators are humans. They need to sleep too. They also have eat so it is not their fault if something happens while they are away.
I'd rather have one moderator like Daynab, carefully chosen for his even-handedness and dedication to the forum policies, plus known to the forum owners, than a bunch of people who aren't really in step with each other and are much greater unknown quantities.
Is it possible to add something simple but bot-failing like "your first post must be in the Introductions thread before you gain the right to post elsewhere on the forums"?
Just ask an abstract but simple question. What direction is the opposite of down? What is negative one times three (In text obviously)? Write the second word only in the following captcha
