The British Steelies Society

Surely there is a way to stop these scam a@#$%holes from joining our Forum and wasting the valuable time our
admin guys have to use up eliminating them from membership, you never see these scammers on the US Forum
so why not approach b0b and see how they combat these irritating s*#%heads.
Quote, "For every action there is a reaction " so come on guys lets exterminate them !!
All the best
Frank. Corfu

the alternative is not having membership being automatic
the candidate submits for membership
after screening he either becomes one or not
simple
that's how b0b & others do it

Every step we take to make it harder / more time consuming for the spammers to register, would make it equally harder / more time consuming for the genuine visitors.

b0b gets around it by charging a $5 fee for forum registration. One thing spammers won't do is part with their (not-so-)hard-earned cash!

Other forums opt for the admin to validate registrations, rather than use first post approval. This actually creates more work for the admins, as every single registration has to be checked manually, rather than just dealing with those who go ahead and post, as only a fraction go as far as posting. For example there were 20 spam registrations yesterday, but only 3 posted. It's far easier to deal with the 3 who post than manually vet the 20 registrations, and since the first posts are moderated nobody except the admins see them, anyway, before they are deleted.

The registration form uses a CAPTCHA which is now owned and ran by Google (reCPATCHA). The spammers are usually not humans but automated "bot" scripts which trawl the web looking for forums to sign up to and submit their rubbish to. But, there can be humans behind these solving the CAPTCHA part for a very low wage.

Recently there has been an increase (not just here) in spammers either solving the CAPTCHA or successfully circumventing it. There are millions of websites using ReCAPTCHA and the advantage of a centralised system is that if it is compromised this is evident early on and steps can (and will, I'm sure) be taken by Google to close the gaps. With spammers it's always an ongoing battle, though.

Cheers for the response Marc and James, I realise now what a difficult task it must be, I overlooked the fact that
b0b charges $5 when you enrole as you've pointed out.
I think James' suggestion could work as long as it did'nt overburden admin anymore.
Thanks again guys.
Frank. Corfu

As part of the ongoing efforts to reduce spam registrations and posts, I have today signed up to a 3rd party service (http://www.cloudflare.com) which will automatically block visitors from know bad networks.

I've also set it to automatically challenge visitors from India, China and the Russian Federation, as stats have shown that this is where a lot of the spam comes from. If anyone has a valid argument not to challenge these visitors then please post here and I'll consider removing this country-based challenge.

A side-effect of this is that the site may actually load a little faster for genuine visitors as well

goodbye! .ru the bain of my life!

Yesterday's stats...

In just one day 405 "threat" page views intercepted and blocked. There were a few spam registrations yesterday but a lot less than usual...so the system seems to do what it claims to

One month on using this system and, despite an initial hitch, it looks promising.

I've certainly noticed a dramatic decrease in spam registrations and posts

Marc, you are doing a great job. Thankyou very much.