spammers becoming more numerous

[JohnDMeyers]

Dear Moderator:

The number of spammers (nuisance and obscene) have increased on this blog, lately.

Is it possible to filter them? move to a different blog server? or change the name of the blog? to try to thin them out a little?

Thanks.

[Zorak]

We have added some extra fields in the registration process to hopefully block some of these spammers.

We were previously under the assumption that these were not automated registrations and posts, because of some of the features of the phpBB forum script, the image captcha validation, etc. This is apparently no longer the case, people have been able to "crack the code" so to speak and are able to register these accounts and flood the board with ignorant posts without ever visiting our site.

There are some modifications that can be made to the board to keep this type of thing from happening, but we are going to use the built-in tools better instead, as a test to see if it helps at all. When you get into modding the system, that means every time there is an update, of having to go back through all of the mods and unbreaking everything manually. Installing updates and then updating each of these mods can sometimes take hours and that is time the forum would be down.

Anyway, the spam posts and users are not something that we take lightly, and several of us check the forums frequently in our off hours to keep too many of you from having to see that garbage each day and over the weekends. Unfortunately, that is no longer enough, so we will continue to take whatever additional measures we need to.

[NeilZ]

Thanks a lot ... I went into one post to 'report' the post, and got hit with some garbage right in the face. Very unusual, very revolting.

I do understand about mods ... they can be a pain, as I maintain a few ecommmerce sites where I have to keep an eye on the PHP mods so they don't get overwritten.