Spam on Nopesport

[Angry Haggis]

Another one - saivenkat
Has used part of the content of a legitimate post and added a spam link.
I fell for it - oops.

[IanD]

And TurbPledbruri, posting in the Petzl Headtorch thread.

[Mr Chips]

Checking the member list, there's still dozens of accounts to delete.

I would say hundreds. Looking back through the last 30 pages of registrations (~1500 of them) the vast majority have never posted and have names that look machine-generated.

[pyrat]

I have taken further agressive measures to remove accounts which have not posted and were created in the last six months. This has removed approximately 7000 user accounts.

The unfortunate side effect is some users who have registered but never posted will have to re-register. Sorry.

[AAH]

Can you change the CAPTCHA to something O-themed? I once came across a CAPTCHA called KittenAuth in which users are presented with randomly selected pictures of animals and the user selects pictures of kittens - a task which is easy for humans but very hard for computers... You could try some like this with an orienteering theme - e.g. the user selects pictures of fragments of orienteering maps from amongst pictures of random maps, or IOF control descriptions... you could potentially screen out both bots and people who don't know anything at all about orienteering... I've never used KittenAuth but googling it there are references to the author having at least in the past created a version in which you can change the images and some references to it being usable with phpBB?

[pyrat]

Nice suggestion @AAH. I would look at this if I had more time. The recaptcha is working well so far and will keep with that for the time being.

[Scott]

ABEL21, over in the Reviews forum. And it seems the account was created today...

[Mrs H]

There seems to be a lot more again recently - on the HOC forum you have to go away and find the chairman's post code when first registering - is that something worth considering - perhaps BOF Central's would suffice

[NFKleanne]

That would work, Mrs H. I was surprised there was no way of checking I was legitimate when I joined, surely though orienteers who join this forum, will have joined BOF, so surely checks could be made on the BOF website - on the find friends part of members area - but saying that I am sure there are people who post from other parts of the world than Britain.

[Mrs H]

I've changed my mind - this could be fun - the spambots are chatting each other up on the travel forum - and they don't seem to have noticed they are related - this could form the plot of a torrid TV mini-series "Orienteers' Wives" or some such Bet gwe'd get a huge increase in membership out of that

[seabird]

Mrs H you raised my hopes of entering another jolly discussion

Seems the moderators have beaten me to it. It all looks genuine now.

[Mrs H]

Ah! it's the early bird that catches the worm (that's an old computer virus joke)

[Mr Chips]

Spammer: johnlesse on Printers thread.

Is this a "human" contribution or are spambots now programmed to appear to make sense?

[SeanC]

I suspect the latter, wouldn't be too hard to write a program to analyse previous posts in the thread and produce something bland looking that might make sense at first glance.

Perhaps we should welcome them in? With improved computer technology the spambots postings might make more sense than the humans. Then we could re-employ them to write our risk assessments and event guidelines

[Mr Chips]

Ah, rather like http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ELIZA