Spam

[Miloch]

Subject related questions are Bad with a capital. I hope it's obvious enough.

 

Berelinde's example is much better. Or other similar questions, like "what color is the second letter of the fifth word in this sentence".

That's no good either for colour blind folks or those who use text-based browsers (or who knows, some folks may even have black-and-white monitors still ). Other questions should be fine, at least until the botter programs the finite responses into their bot program. At which point, it's simply a matter of changing the questions.

 

Edit: I actually like Ishad Nha's solution best. Botters are going to have very little motivation to crack forum-specific questions just so they can spam a single forum. If someone wanted to do that, they wouldn't use a bot at all. Botters crack global anti-spam measures like captcha because they can spam a whole bunch of forums that use it after they crack it.

 

[And wtf is hotKiz still doing here as an online registered user?]

[berelinde]

Think up questions to your heart's content, but it won't help. Changing the registration process requires access to the admin control panel. Which theacefes and Grim Squeaker say is malfunctioning.

 

So file it under "Unhelpful, but thanks for the concern."

 

Thought up a good analogy for all the "Hey, look! Spam!" comments we've been getting. It's August in Manhattan on a 105 degree day. A black-uniformed traffic cop is trying to clear gridlock following a traffic signal failure. Every five minutes, some guy in an air conditioned car rolls down his window to say "So, how about this heat?" After about the fourth or fifth time, that cop is pobably finding it difficult to remember that the chatty guy is just making smalltalk.

 

Don't be that guy.

[lynx]

ftp/ssh access is enough actually, as this could be hacked up pretty easily.

[Miloch]

So file it under "Unhelpful, but thanks for the concern."

It's only unhelpful insofar as the forum software is apparently broken, which is a problem in and of itself but repairing the forum control panel per se won't fix the spam issue. There are actually some good ideas here on fixing that problem. Or would you rather manually delete it all?

[berelinde]

Until the admin panel gets fixed and theacefes or Grim Squeaker can IP ban their butts and do mass deletions, the only thing we can do is manually delete every individual post. It sucks.

[lynx]

IP bans/blacklists suck too, as we're not in the age of static IPs anymore. The problematic accounts need to be disabled and that is also possible by directly modifying the forum database.

[Ishad Nha]

Sounds like this board has been penetrated a bit by hackers, and not just spammed. Surely, if they could, the moderators would get rid of hotKiz and other spammers. They know who the spammers are.

So hotKiz is logged on for ages but he does not succeed in actually spamming. Seems to be a stalemate where the board has the upper hand.

[CoM_Solaufein]

If you can't get into your admin console, delete these spam bot accounts through the MySQL database.

[Ishad Nha]

They are all still there, sorting the members list by Join Date and Descending Order shows all of the known spammers are still registered here.