Boy, I leave you people alone for an hour to go wash the dog, and all kinds of shit breaks out.
Regards,
Shodan
I don’t think even human-answerable is enough: I believe spammers have now simply enlisted humans to defeat these security measures for them, either knowingly (low-paid drone somewhere) or unknowingly (use the information as another site’s Captcha and redirect the answer back).
You either need to make the hoops to join onerous enough that spammers will move onto easier targets, restrict newbie’s privileges so much that you can easily detect spammers before they get to post their spam, or block them at the source. The first two are dangerous for any board that wants to keep its membership growing, which leaves only the third. We’ve had a lot of success with it, I suspect it would greatly reduce the mods’ workload here.
My mistake. I haven’t tested it recently.
We have something like that. No, it’s not enough on its own. We’ll have to look into some of this other stuff during the week, when more of the mods are around.
I think the two biggest offending countries this year are China and India. Banning those countries would stop over 50% of our spam. But, we have legitimate current posters from those countries.
You don’t IP ban the whole country, you just put new registrations from there into a Moderation queue for approval. I’ve found you can just mass delete them all every few months or so. If a legitimate poster wants to join from those countries, they’ll almost always follow up with an email asking why their registration hasn’t gone through, at which point you can manually approve their registration.
The idea of having every new member’s first post be vetted by moderators has been discussed, and we’ve rejected it. We get lots of new comers who do some sort of internet search on a topic, find Cecil’s column, and want to respond. If it takes two days (or whatever) for a moderator to see, read, and OK it, they’ve lost their impetus.
But having new posters from specific countries go into some sort of waiting queue sounds like a good idea. We’ll discuss next week. Thanks.
I would put Romania ahead of India on your list. Most of the “watch free movie” spams come from Romania.
All these suggestions: Are these things that moderators can do? Or are these things that only an Administrator can do? As we well know by now, this board has only one Administrator, and he is not inclined (perhaps by fiat of the Higher PTB?) to invest any more effort into this board than absolutely necessary.
So are any of these suggestions actual, y’know, possibilities?
29? Don’t they normally come in pairs?
That chick from Total Recall keeps throwing off the count.
For those not wanting to sift through the 2 letter country codes, over half are from China and over 3/4 are from China, the US and the Ukraine. Some of the US stuff might be nonresidents operating through proxies though, or so I speculate. With that in mind, 10-15% of the traffic is from the US. Canada and France also vie for positions 4-6.
India isn’t listed in their stats though, which makes me wonder about their reliability.
Here’s that site’s page on India. It’s only .63% of the total spam. It might be that Indian spammers don’t hit forums as much as other targets.
Honestly, I don’t know. That’s why we need to discuss next week when those what does know are involved in the discussion (lots of traveling this weekend)
I would never have joined the board if I’d had to go through all that(I’m from India). Now granted, that may not have been much of a loss, but FWIW. Increasing the registration burden even slightly will lead to a disproportionate drop off in new users.
Of course, so many IP addresses from my ISP are banned that I’ve just given up and access the board through a proxy, so maybe they can’t really raise the registration burden any higher anyway.
If you are counting on emails to weed out false positives, be sure that the address is clearly visible. I’ve been to some forums where it isn’t, and it became nearly impossible to get a hold of anyone when there were problems.
You might thing that everyone emails you if they are legit, but how do you know about the people who didn’t?
I thought this post was for me since I waited longer than I should have to replace my beat-up passport for an upcoming trip and have been checking the Department of State’s website like twice a day to see the status of the application.
It is free.
And it’s here.
Next time, try walking the dog before the bath.
Ban them all and let Cecil sort them out! I thought he was all-knowing – what’s the problem?
We did that already.