Spammers Getting Trial Memberships!?

[rbattelle]

Check out post #4 in this thread.



Very interesting, eh? Steve, I assume there's a way to stamp out such behavior?



-Ryan

 

[fest3er]

There *used* to be a way to stamp it out: use a Captcha that asks questions that require a human to answer. Alas, spammers are now hiring Asians to post spam; at least some of them are bright enough to answer the captchas correctly.

I set up human captcha on the MTDTC web site; club officers haven't complained about spam since. The Smoothwall site also employs human captchas, but a few Asian spammers have gotten through in recent months.

It may turn out that the only real solution to spam will be to create virtual networks (VPNs) that are invitation only and the inviter must know the invitee personally. Then the only systems that can access the members of the VPN are ... members of the VPN. And, perhaps, trusted internet hosts.

 

[guldam]

I run a forum for boat builders, and a few weeks ago I got hit hard by bots requesting membership, and that was with security settings at max.



So I set up a plug in that asks five simple questions. Suddenly the bots went away. And the human spammers are too stupid to answer the questions, most of which actually include the answer.



I did an experiment a few months back. I set up a forum that had minimal security settings for joining. Within a couple months I had 5,000 members, and about 5,001 postings. All were bots. Amazing.



GulDam

 

[Steve St.Laurent]

Thanks for letting me know Ryan. If you guys see anything like this there's a report a post button on the lower left of every post. We use Captcha and they have to respond to an email activation before they can post. But as said sometimes it's actually humans doing it and they've gotten pretty good with software at figuring out captcha. It's a cost of doing business and we'll delete them as they come up. Fortunately it doesn't happen very often.

-Steve