Information about the forum's anti-spam measures

[Isaac Eiland-Hall]

In an effort to combat the constant spam and workload this causes on moderators, the way we fight spam has recently been updated:

1. Some of the anti-spam measures on signups have been removed to make it easier to sign up
2. New members with zero posts are only allowed to post in the "POST HERE" board
3. Once they post and that post is approved, their account is unrestricted and allowed to post anywhere
4. New accounts that do not post in the POST HERE topic are deleted periodically

So far, this seems to have prevented spammers from gaining even temporary benefit from signng up as their spam attempts are never seen by anyone except mods.

There is a small chance that if someone signs up and doesn't post in the POST HERE board fast enough, if I happen to be deleting zero-post accounts, they might lose that account. But it's easy to sign up again, and they would have lost nothing except a minute or two of time, so while I apologize if this happens to anyone... it's really, honestly, not a big deal.

It's been amusing to see the spam bots sign up and post their spam in the POST HERE board. For the ones that post 10-20+ times... it WOULD be annoying to delete those manually, but I just delete that account and remove the posts as a part of that process. For everyone else, I search for all the members with zero posts and remove them. Moderation has gotten much quicker, and spammers win NOTHING. YOU LOSE. heh

[209CATrus]

Isaac, eventho i hate pretty much everything that has "web" and "ai" in it, but there's that "Anubis by Techaro" thing that keeps appearing here and there on websites that i visit. How about implementing it? On the other hand spam bots keep moderators involved in the forum,,, but you can try going for at least a Cloudflare antibot checkbox i guess.

What a time we live in, spambot-related topics are one of the most active on this forum

[Isaac Eiland-Hall]

What we are doing now, from a user standpoint:

1. Makes it easier to sign up
2. Does require a post in the "POST HERE" board
3. Eliminates spam from appearing anywhere users can access

From an admin standpoint:

Instead of getting reports about spammers who successfully signed up and posted, and having to remove the posts/comments, then ban and delete the user, which is a surprising number of clicks for every single spammer which were coming in at around 4-5 per day, now all I do is check the POST HERE thread for legitimate commens, approve any legitimate comments which gives the user 1 post count. Then I go to the list of members with zero posts and delete them all in one go, which is two clicks.

The slight exception is if we get a bot that posts spam in the POST HERE board, which right now appears to be one recurring bot that hits every couple/few days. Then it's slghtly more complicated, but no worse than the previous method.

So what we have now works as close to perfect as possible, making things easier for the users, and very importantly should all but eliminate false positives and ambiguous signups.

After the recent changes, topics are no longer being bumped by bots.