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Anti Spam measures

Started by Stephen, February 23, 2012, 11:29:46 AM

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Stephen

This forum has been getting a lot of spam recently. Despite my having installed several "anti spam" plugins for SMF, the bots are still getting through. >:(

It seems the bots are quite clever nowadays -- recaptcha does not stop them, for example. Even putting questions like "what tool do you hit nails with" on the registration page doesn't work -- I have read that spammers employ humans to answer questions like those. (Apparently, the money they make from spamming is more than the cost of paying someone in a low wage country to answer questions all day long...)

I have now added a verification question that only genuine Knights fans would be able to answer. The intention is not to "exclude" anyone from the forum, but just to stop spammers (a spammer is probably not going to have time to look up the answer, they are just going to move on to the next forum). So far it seems to be working :)

Also, links posted by new members will show as "disabled" until they have three posts. This is just a precaution in case spammers somehow get through the filters and start posting lots of links.

Note: I hope these measures don't stop any genuine Knights fans from posting or registering; if you do have any problems, please drop me an email (my address is on the Knights home page).