I've seen forums get so inundated by spam that they were useless for days as no legitimate new post could be found among the endless spams. So far it's nowhere near lethal levels here, so is that the captcha's or not?
However, with the spam that's already defeating the captcha's, you have to wonder if instead of spambots, do they have sweatshops of children relentlessly assaulting forums?? Certainly there can't be much monetary gain from these spam messages to such blatantly ripoff sites is there??
Yes: without a doubt. We definitely need some sort of authentication or spam blockers. The spam was out of control. If I read the boards in the morning before the mods had a chance to clean it up, there was page after page of spam. The mods were spending a lot of their volunteer time deleting messages.
I'm a member of the CTC forum
http://forum.ctc.org.uk I'm a "Spambuster" on there along with a small army of volunteers. I have the ability to remove posts that break the guidelines and remove any spam.
Also, any post from a new member - the first post - has to be authorised before it gets into public view. When I log on, there may be a queue of posts to authenticate. The workload is easy because there's a few of us doing it daily. The forum members know we do this, but it all happens without the public seeing anything.
The 1st Poster has to answer a simple question before he can post, and even if he manages to get spam on the forum, it won't be seen!
As a further defence, we have certain countries blocked from posting, but if there's a bona fide poster, he can still get on by contacting the administrators.
All this is made plain to anyone wanting to post on the forum.
It works well, and we never have any spam in public view. Eventually, the spammers will learn!
There are mods deleting stuff behind the scenes here also, I've just got rid of about 50 spam posts this morning alone. The ones you do see are a fraction of what hits the site.
I like though the idea of a first time poster having to be 'authorised', hopefully the admin teanm will consider this.
I'm a member of the CTC forum
http://forum.ctc.org.uk I'm a "Spambuster" on there along with a small army of volunteers. I have the ability to remove posts that break the guidelines and remove any spam.
Also, any post from a new member - the first post - has to be authorised before it gets into public view. When I log on, there may be a queue of posts to authenticate. The workload is easy because there's a few of us doing it daily. The forum members know we do this, but it all happens without the public seeing anything.
The 1st Poster has to answer a simple question before he can post, and even if he manages to get spam on the forum, it won't be seen!
As a further defence, we have certain countries blocked from posting, but if there's a bona fide poster, he can still get on by contacting the administrators.
All this is made plain to anyone wanting to post on the forum.
It works well, and we never have any spam in public view. Eventually, the spammers will learn!
Regards,
Mick.
I only took a quick look at your forum, but it didn't appear to have any social media integration like this one does. I seems to me that a significant amount of the spam comes from accounts that were legitimately created then hijacked. So the efforts to deal with first time posters would be for naught.
However spam still gets through the captchas, but it seems more managible to me from the member side of things. I've no idea what is like for the mods and admins.
The spammers on this board are trying to sell call girls in Mumbai and kitchen cabinets in the UK. Pretty sure the market for those "services" is very small here but they continue.
Personally I don't mind entering Captcha's but the ones here seem to have become harder to read of late. I often have to try 4-5 times before I get one right.
PS: The Captcha's sometimes don't display at all in FireFox 25.0.1. I'm on my 6th try right now.
No, it doesn't have any social media integration. Personally, I don't care one way or another.
Also, no, there is no spam from legit accounts, and no accounts get hijacked.
Efforts to deal with first time posters are excellent, and we weed out all the spam.
Thanks for looking, but maybe you need to look further.
Regards, Mick.
My point on the social media integration is that all the forums I use that have social media integration are heavily spammed. The forums I use that do not are with few exceptions spam free. So although I have no experience with forums administration and the programming code for forums --though I am a programmer -- my perception is that the social media integration makes forums more susceptible to spam.
So to compare your spam free site to this one may be apples and oranges, there's other stuff going on that I'm not sure your suggestions would help. But that is for the admins, mods and owners of the forum to decide.
