PM spam

electron

Administrator
Staff member
Until I have more time to address this, the PM feature has been disabled for new users. While this maceylove message was a one time thing (looks like they are using real humans to answer the bot questions, and then handing the accounts over to bots), I don't want this to happen again.

Hopefully this temporary restriction won't be too big of an inconvenience.
 
Until I have more time to address this, the PM feature has been disabled for new users. While this maceylove message was a one time thing (looks like they are using real humans to answer the bot questions, and then handing the accounts over to bots), I don't want this to happen again.

Hopefully this temporary restriction won't be too big of an inconvenience.

Maybe you should have them answer a series of HA related questions and if they get them correct they get to PM. :-)
 
You guys are making me feel bad for banning this person now, didn't realize 'she' created that much excitement ;)
 
It's just amazing to me how dumb forum spam is....on my forum, 99.9% of new users are spammers. Many per day. Very hard to register "real" people without them going out of their way via email or known customer handles.

I assume there are companies that pay for how many user IDs created or even attempted. The next funny thing is even when they get an account created, they hardly ever post anything (spam or otherwise).

Dan, when you figure out a method...please share!

I had thought of the "answer these three HA questions correctly" way to screen, but not sure I can figure out what three questions all real customers or folks with true interest could answer that a spammer couldn't. The captcha doesn't work for squat anymore.

I have banned known spammer domains (most are .ru) but no apparant impact.
 
We need to establish a "bridge of death" and ask three questions to all new members.

...and you know what happens if they don't answer correctly...
 
Well the method I put in place blocks all bots, haven't seen one register in years, and I don't even have CAPTCHA enabled. I think I will keep the PM restriction (plus several other restrictions) for new users in place. If someone really needs this functionality without wanting to post, they can e-mail me (as they have been doing so far) and I will manually upgrade the account.
 
We need to establish a "bridge of death" and ask three questions to all new members.

...and you know what happens if they don't answer correctly...

Blue......no.......Yellowwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwww

:lol:
 
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