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jimnyc
10-10-2008, 04:24 PM
As many have you have undoubtedly noticed, we've been inundated with spammers attempting to join the board - hence all the new wacky usernames you've seen. This is a collection of people using a "bot" - software that they pre-fill with names, email addresses, websites and quite a bit of other details. The software is even capable of reading the "Captcha" images upon registration. You haven't seen any actual spam on the board as I have been manually approving all accounts and banning the spammers on the spot utilizing a known spammer ban list.

I've now installed software that will automatically cross reference a database that contains IP's, emails and usernames of known spammers. Should it be referenced, the account won't even be created and the spammer will be shown a message telling them as much. Hopefully this will do the trick but I am going to leave new registrations moderated for now until I see how it performs.

In no way, shape or form are any of these "members" able to get anything from this board other than a post spamming their services. All member information here is perfectly secure. This is just simply an automated way for spammers to bulk spam forums throughout the internet.

jimnyc
10-13-2008, 08:40 AM
While the installed software put a dent in the plans of the spammers, it wasn't catching all of them, as I'm sure new emails/usernames are constantly updated.

I've installed yet another piece of code that monitors incoming registrations and times how long it takes the "user" to register. It would take 45 seconds to 2 minutes for a savvy user to register and less than 10 seconds for a "bot". If the timing is too quick, the registration is denied. This appears to be working much better than the first piece of software but I'll leave both active for ultimate protection.