Spam postings here on the forum / what to do ?

[Gert]

Gentlemen,

srecently there had been an increasing amount of spam postings here on the forum. As s short-term action all DfM developers are now endowed with the permission to ban users and to delete postings. Thank you to all and specifically to Achim who used their permission to get rid of the latest spam postings !

What is your opinion, how should we continue on this problem ? Just by deleting the spam postings once these show up ?

Or should we change our registration scheme for the forum, so that a person who requests access to the forum has to send a 'personal' email to a 'forum member administrator' who then manually activates the account ? Well, we would need to find a few 'forum member administrators' who are ready to respons to registration requests.

Or any other solution ?

Besides, Stefan (our 'all forum administrator') told me that there are spambots which are able to decode the Captcha pictures during the registration.

Waiting for your opinion,
Gert

[Stefan1200]

Just to show how save captcha images are: http://caca.zoy.org/wiki/PWNtcha

There is almost nothing we can do know. Just hope that the next major version of this forum use another captcha system, which maybe save for another 6 month.

[Stefan1200]

I installed another forum modification which add a second "human proof" to the register page. Maybe this helps?

[axin]

Hi,

that new system seems to be very different from the standard one, maybe it's already a solution!

If not, we could also replace the other captchas with reCAPTCHA which are as far as I know harder to crack. Another solution could be the usage of a black-listing service like Stop Forum Spam which of course has the problems of all black-listing-services (there will be false alerts and false blocks).

Still, I think we can first just wait and observe the number of spam postings with the new system.

Regards,
Achim