Forum upgrade

[SH-Andre]

Dear visitor,

Today we have upgraded our forums, which was necessary due to a large number of spambots which started to post (automated) spam messages all over the forums.

Previously, our forum already had Captcha (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Captcha) integrated in order to stop spambots from registering as users on our forums. Up until now, this worked fine, but apparently the spammers have found a way to defeat the most recent Captcha technologies that we had integrated.

In order to prevent this from happening, we have upgraded our forums so that we could integrate reCAPTCHA (http://recaptcha.net), a newer and more advanced system to prevent spambots from registering. Moreover, it actually makes it easier for humans to read the verification text, which is obviously also an advantage.

Should you - for any reason - have any problem registering, then please let us know.

Thank you!

[iamback]

Originally Posted by SH-Andre

Today we have upgraded our forums, which was necessary due to a large number of spambots which started to post (automated) spam messages all over the forums.

It seems the recaptcha didn't help all that much... unless the bots have been replaced by a human? See for instance http://forums.solidhost.com/showpost...65&postcount=8 and another identical post by the same user, both yesterday.

[SH-Andre]

Originally Posted by iamback

It seems the recaptcha didn't help all that much... unless the bots have been replaced by a human? See for instance http://forums.solidhost.com/showpost...65&postcount=8 and another identical post by the same user, both yesterday.

These appear to be actual humans whom register an account on the forums manually, after which their bots start posting spam messages.

Unfortunately it's impossible to block that, unless we would also implement recaptcha for each post of each registered user. Since that wouldn't be too convenient for the real users, we won't do that. The best solution is that we simply remove spammers from the forum once they've been spotted. If all users could report spam messages that would definitely be helpful and much appreciated.

As for whether or not the recaptcha system works: I can assure you that it does. Every day it is blocking hundreds of spambots from registering, so that is of course a great result.

[iamback]

Originally Posted by SH-Andre

These appear to be actual humans whom register an account on the forums manually, after which their bots start posting spam messages.

Unfortunately it's impossible to block that, unless we would also implement recaptcha for each post of each registered user. Since that wouldn't be too convenient for the real users, we won't do that. The best solution is that we simply remove spammers from the forum once they've been spotted.

One thing you might look at is installing Akmismet or a similar anti-spam service: that will trap spam posts (rather than users) based on content. It's not 100% accurate, but then no anti-spam solution is. But I'm sure it would have caught the spam posts I saw here recently. I know there is an Akismet plugin for vBulletin (check their forums).

A similar service to Akismet is Defensio (reputedly even better but I haven't tried it out yet); don't know if there is a vBulletin plugin, but worth looking into.