CMHWAK

it's dead if you want it to be.

I shouldn't speak too soon, but it's been a couple days and no spambots have registered. There are some existing ones but, as I understand it, the majority of phpbb-infiltrated spambots make one or two posts directly after registration and then become inactive.

So I suppose changing the registration anti-spam human-verification questions did it. If they come back, I'll repeat this process. When I have more free time on my hands, I'll try to purge the member list of more spambots.

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cmhwak wrote:I'm going to add an extra moderator and work on something to counteract this spam, it is getting out of hand and I don't know how they're getting through but I'll try to find a way to stop it.

I'd be happy to help remove spam if it happens again.

R.I.P. the internet

I just logged out to see the new registration questions. I lol'd

The changes only seemed to have worked for a few days. I can't change the questions every few days. So I'm going to see if there's any kind of plugin to implement the same concept on a better scale. It's like the spam bots are working together. The current system has the flaw that the number-related questions actually give an error that reveals the correct number. Which wouldn't be an issue, since they only have three attempts and there are a lot of questions. But if there's some kind of system of bots that records the correct numbers for subsequent tries, that might be getting them through.

So we'll try to delete spam as it comes and try something new to rid the forum of these kitchen jerks.

Edit: Tried something new, something that hides the "correct" values in the error page on user registration when some values are incorrect. Also added new questions. It's now quite a lot of work to register here.

cmhwak wrote:The changes only seemed to have worked for a few days. I can't change the questions every few days. So I'm going to see if there's any kind of plugin to implement the same concept on a better scale. It's like the spam bots are working together. The current system has the flaw that the number-related questions actually give an error that reveals the correct number. Which wouldn't be an issue, since they only have three attempts and there are a lot of questions. But if there's some kind of system of bots that records the correct numbers for subsequent tries, that might be getting them through.

So we'll try to delete spam as it comes and try something new to rid the forum of these kitchen jerks.

Edit: Tried something new, something that hides the "correct" values in the error page on user registration when some values are incorrect. Also added new questions. It's now quite a lot of work to register here.

i've been working on deleting the kitchen posts too... I just deleted one this morning, looks like it's still not working what do?