Spam on Nopesport

[SeanC]

The latest wiki on forum spam is interesting:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forum_spam

They mention Optical Character Recognition software as a way bots might get round CAPTCHA's, could that get round the CAPTCHA/RECAPCHA used on this forum? (I'm not sure of the difference).

In the "effects of spam" section it mentions:

"Spam prevention and deletions measurably increase the workload of forum administrators and moderators. The amount of time and resources spent keeping a forum spam free contributes significantly to labor cost, and the skill required in the running of a public forum. Marginally profitable or smaller forums may be permanently closed by administrators."

[roadrunner]

Rather than a conventional CAPTCHA, how about using an orienteering-based one, e.g. "what does this map symbol represent?" (Obviously, don't pick anything too obscure to put off newcomers!) Maybe there'd need to be another way in for them, but something along those lines ought to make life harder for the spammers.

Edit: Probably best to use OS map symbols rather than orienteering ones - I think people wanting to post (legitimately!) are almost certainly either in or from the UK, so should be familiar with OS maps (or know how to find out about them).

[IanD]

I apologise for my impatience.

I think the best way of stopping spam is preventing it from being posted in the first place. However, I can see from reading posts above that this is harder than it used to be.

If while a better prevention is worked out and implemented, the mods would like to authorise some people to delete spam posts and threads, I would be happy to be one such person.

[mikey]

I am happy to delete spams if that is any help.

[DaveK]

So am I (as well as some other postings possibly)

[Tatty]

Please do so quickly. There has been loads in the last few days

[Spookster]

Please do so quickly. There has been loads in the last few days

The problem is that it's too easy to register. 35 new members registered with Nopesport yesterday for example, and every one of them is probably a spambot. The spambots are presumably sharing the forum web address with each other, so it'll just get worse.

Deleting the spam after it appears is just addressing the symptom. Making registration much much harder is probably the cure.

[SeanC]

One way to kill off the spam would be to block automatic nopesport registration for all email addresses that are not in the BOF database. Non BOF members would need some other way of registering... perhaps a direct email request to the moderator with an extended question which would be difficult for a computer or a person employed by the spammers to answer convincingly. Eg.

"What would you change in Orienteering and why, answer in over 100 words".

Applicants with good rants could go automatically to orange status.

[AndyC]

Anyone thought that "Internal Server Error" might persuade them to post once and go away rather than post more than once with the same ID?
It certainly made a certain club chairman believe that he'd done something wrong when he posted for the first time on Saturday

[NFKleanne]

another couple just came on - not even gonna bother opening them

[Adrian]

Here's some more lovely spam: the latest info about my event in Birmingham tomorrow http://reentrant.wordpress.com/2011/03/ ... l-details/