Ditto. IME, though, spammers will never email you. They thrive on automated processes.
You must be whooshing me. Spammers haven’t yet discovered how to automate emails?
Direct email to a board admin made to look like a personalized request to access your board? Never happens to me. Seriously.
Spammers generally combine the two qualities of laziness and being dirt stupid. It would never even occur to them to do that, I think.
You underestimate the resourcefulness of spammers, who are directing one of the most profitable businesses in the world, so I hear. The harder we make it for them to post on a board, the more efforts they make to get around us.
I get “personalized requests” for my bank account number and password, ebay data, etc. on an hourly basis. Ever heard of phishing? Putting “admin@{board name}” in an email address with some text is pretty much the easiest programming task ever invented. It happens frequently and often. What’s the diff between saying you are a prince from Nigeria or a blind guy from Brazil?
If spammers are now able to parse some capchas, writing a text message is certainly not beyond them.
If you’re whooshing me, forget everything I said.
You underestimate the resourcefulness of spammers, who are directing one of the most profitable businesses in the world, so I hear. The harder we make it for them to post on a board, the more efforts they make to get around us.
I get “personalized requests” for my bank account number and password, ebay data, etc. on an hourly basis. Ever heard of phishing? Putting “admin@{board name}” in an email address with some text is pretty much the easiest programming task ever invented. It happens frequently and often. What’s the diff between saying you are a prince from Nigeria or a blind guy from Brazil?
If spammers are now able to parse some capchas, writing a text message is certainly not beyond them.
If you’re whooshing me, forget everything I said.
Capchas? What are these capchas? Variant of the word “capture”?
It’s an attempt to separate the robots from the real people by presenting a problem only a real person could solve. Until someone writes a program to emulate a person, however.
You’re still overestimating the intelligence of the bulk of these spammers.
99.99999%* of the message board spammers I’ve encountered on my board use automated software to register their bogus accounts. These programs are commercial software packages designed to hit as many message boards as possible, automating as many parts of the process as possible. They can read most common capchas, register bogus email accounts to accept email board verification and then automatically click on said verification emails. They usually come with a database of ca 15,000 message boards. All the spammers have to do is download one of these packages, fill in their information and hit the “go” button. This requires roughly the intelligence level of fungus.
Sure, the authors of the software are probably relatively talented programmers, but most of the users and most of the people cluttering your boards are not the programmers of these packages. Once I blocked some of the more common spamming mail addresses, blocked a few of the most common spam ISP’s, put in a non-standard capcha that these commercial spam software packages do not recognize…what do you know, no more spammers.
Seriously, we went from having dozens of bogus registrations per day down to zero, almost overnight after enabling these measures. And if their programmers do, for some reason, feel the need to crack the custom protection on my board somehow (for one 1 message board out of…15k?), I’ll just move to a different capcha. Not a big deal.
As for the admin@ thing…my contact email for board administration does not use it. 
- Fire sale on numbers pulled out of my ass, this day only!