Really? And what is that interest, beyond simple curiosity? Just because you *want * to know something doesn’t mean you *need * to know something, or are *entitled * to know something.
I don’t know about a year, but I once did a search through some of our earliest members.
Aboat 1 in 6 are still active, eh?
Ladies and gentlemen— The fight against ignorance is over!
[sub]now go to bed.[/sub]
You obviously have not been paying your Board Insurance to Uncle Beer.
Speaking of Unc–where is he?
Spending his ill gotten gain, no doubt.
I thought you Moderators kept track of each other.
Uncle Beer retired quite a while back. Guess you didn’t get that memo.
WHAT?
I’ve been paying bri…Board Insurance to him and he’s no longer a Moderator?
Oh, fie!
I’m sure he/she will have many, many valuable contributions to make to the board.
Somehow I think he/she would do better as a member…
My prediction, sad as it is: “You ain’t seen nuthin’ yet.”
At the rate the bot attacks are increasing on other boards, I think SDMB will have to switch to some kind of moderated pre-registration, even for guests. And vB may have to come up with some better tools to cope with the flood. Some spammers seem content with the minimal gains of registering or partial registering just to get a link posted in a profile.
Word. My site has been flooded with spam registrations over the last month - over 350 new users, only a tiny handful of which were legitimate. Apparently they cracked vBulletin’s brand of captcha image verification for registering on the site. Strangely, only a few of them actually posted so I didn’t notice the flood earlier.
I ended up installing a great plugin from vBulletin.org called NoSpam on Wednesday. It asks registrants to answer simple questions that you specify like “What year comes after 2006?” Works like a charm; I’ve only had a few registrations in the last few days, and they’ve all been legit (although one kind of looks like a moron, but it’s hard to filter those out).
Thanks for the plugin tip.
But if I put myself in a spammer’s shoes (my, but it’s squishy in there), I think I could write a routine in just a few minutes to answer those Turing-like questions without human interaction, so I doubt if that is anything but a short-term solution.
“Hmmm” question: If the response to a Turing challenge sounds moronic, is it a computer or just a stupid person? 
Sorry, Slacker, I hadn’t investigated the vB plugin much when I replied. Now I see the system is more elaborate and probably harder to defeat than I originally thought. The questions/answers are admin-configurable for each board, and random ones can be chosen from a list. This would make it harder for a bot to parse and reply.
Harder, but not impossible. The bots could gather all the challenges from one board, make a list of responses with human help, then go to work. The board admins would have to make up new questions and change the list frequently to keep ahead of it.
SDMB mods – have you taken a look at this one? I see it was released last August, and the vB forum on the topic is full of praise for it since. One poster said they inserted the challenge code in their guest searches as well. That might be something SDMB could do – if guests could search without too much additional server overhead, it might make life easier for all of us.
Those in charge of the SDMB seem VERY conservative when it comes to updating the software or installing mods. I have a feeling that they would rather put up with the spammers rather than upgrade to vB 3.6.* (which has a VERY strong CAPTCHA that hasn’t been cracked by the Russian bots) or the NoSpam plugin.
I managed to keep spammers at bay by:
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Using up-to-date versions of vBulletin, and using custom fonts in the CAPTCHA.
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Blocking proxy IPs used by Xrumer. They proxies are all over the world, but heavily concentrated in Russia, the Ukraine, and the United Arab Emirates.
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Blacklisting most high-risk free email services, including the domains of almost every free email provider in Eastern Europe and Central Asia. There’s hundreds of such addresses, since many Russian, Bulgarian and Ukrainian free email services allow users to choose among many domain names. Seriously, if someone registers with a .ru or .ua domain, 999 times out of 100 on an English-language board, it’s going to be a spammer.
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Blocking many IPs of bulletproof hosting companies in Russia and the Ukraine, where bots run wild. I also block Nigeria - the entire country, including all European and Israeli satellite ISPs, which provide service to cybercafes in Nigeria and other western African nations. I don’t care about appearing xenophobic; I have NEVER had a legitimate user from Nigeria, and I’m unwilling to put up with hundreds of Nokia spams in the hopes that years from now, a non-spamming user from Lagos will register.
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Check profiles of new users carefully to see if they fit a profile of a spamming user. There’s a lot to look out for - among many other things, types of user names that are not typical of those on the board (on my board, I’m suspicious of those with GaMeRz-ish and HaXoRz-ish names), users claiming to be in the UK but selecting a time zone in the US or Russia, and email addresses or user names that seem marketing-ish (v1agara4ch33p or se0market3r are probably not going to be legitimate users).
Sorry for the followup, but …
A way for the SDMB community to fight spam might be to perform a Google search for new user names when they have the time. If there’s hundreds of hits that are spammy, or the name appears on hundreds of other message boards, report it to the mods.