Speaking of Spam...

[GSX]

When you take a look at the memberlist of this board
http://images.spamgourmet.com/phpBB2/me ... &start=100
you'll find that there are a lot ot "0 posts" accounts that provide a homepage. A closer look and you'll see that a lot of members have the same homepage, differ only slightly by name or point to a "commercial" page.

Maybe you should take actions against automated registering; it's kind of humiliating when a fight-spam-board is spammed.

[josh]

yeah -- drives me nuts. We go through and purge messages once in awhile, but haven't looked at the users profiles. I'll just mod the page to not show the homepages.

I keep playing with the settings of the bbs (and make small changes to the code) to try and help with this, but it's an uphill battle. PHPBB2 is great stuff, but like any good software package, there are updates to contend with, and they have a tendency to wipe out local mods.

If it gets bad enough, we'll just write our own bbs package.

[SysKoll]

Whenever I catch a new user with a spam site URL in his profile, I remove the URL from the profile. And if the user has posted a spam, I naturally remove the user too. Not that it takes a great effort to spam the forums. However, I make sure spam messages are removed whenever I see them.

But it's a constant fight. We might need to use the captcha system to prevent automated posts.

[Guest]

What's 'captcha'? Is it that verification thing with the fuzzy images?

[SysKoll]

That's correct. CAPTCHA means "Completely Automated Public Turing test to Tell Computers and Humans Apart". I also found that it's now a trademark.

The registration for new sg users employs a captcha to prevent automated registrations.

[Guest]

Check out the captcha's used at mail.com's signup screen. They are MUCH more difficult than SG's. So much, in fact, that they can tell humans apart, too! [ha-ha] I had real trouble with some of the images - not with focus, contrast or color differentiation, but rather with some letters that were so grossly distorted as to be almost unrecognizable.

I think you should try the same images.

If you go to mail.com to check them out, be wary of the signup form. Don't accidentally fill in your name and date of birth Are they kidding with that?

[SysKoll]

Err... You just told us that the captcha used by mail.com is so over-the-top that it's almost impossible to decypher, and you want us to use it?

[Guest]

Yes. If humans have trouble, then computer algorithms have no chance, at least at the current state of development [that is, I think I'm at least partly human ; did anyone ever see a movie titled THE CRAIGUS or THE CLICKERS?]

Check it out for yourself. I meant no disrespect, I just thought to make SG bullet proof.

I have the impression that the SG captcha, like quite a few others I have seen, isn't all that fuzzy. I can imagine image recognition software reading these easier captchas.

Of course, I have not tested, and I have no direct experience.

[SysKoll]

It would be very easy to make our captcha fuzzier, so don't worry. Right now, we don't have a problem with automated registration. Some people manually spam the forum, and we manually delete the posts a few hours later. If they hope to increase their google ranking by spamming this forum, they are dead wrong, it's a waste of time.

For instance, their is currently a Chinese guy who tries to plaster the forum with chinese spam advertising domains in nease.net. The little bugger is persistent, if not very smart: every morning, there are more. But does it work? Nope: looking for references to his spamnest in our site return 0 match.

[Paranoid2000]

The "zero-posters" could surely be dealt with by making the membership list private? (requiring a login to view, preventing it from being picked up by search engines). At the very least, adding it to Spamgourmet's robots.txt file (currently looking a little sparse...) would prevent homepage links from being picked up.

As for the Chinese spammer, just changing the wording in his links to include references to Falun Gong or Tibet should work wonders.