Spam Bots

[Marcus Diaz]

As Samuel L Jackson would say; "Im tired of all these blankety blank spam bots on this blankety blank forum"

They're annoying, and seem to pop up once a day. Can we keep them out for good?

 

[Joey Ketcham]

I also find them annoying. I thought when new members signed up, they had to do an essay and pay a one-time membership fee. If so, how are the spam bots getting around that?

 

[Skip Talbot]

It's a time consuming process of looking at the registrants' profiles and checking them off one by one for approval, made much worse by that fact that we're getting 10-20 Chinese spambot registrants a day. We catch 99.9% of them, but because it's all done by hand, a couple will slip through the cracks now and then. We've put in a request to have a Captcha or more user friendly Captcha alternative put into the registration form to make it easier on us to go through the registrants. Hopefully Tim will have some time soon to put it in.

 

[Matt Tottle]

Why not simply ban all the Asian IP addresses? Do we even have any legit members from there?

 

[Rob H]

Why not simply ban all the Asian IP addresses? Do we even have any legit members from there?

I wouldn't be surprised if the text/names used were all mangled English from legit Chinese spammers, and the actual IP addresses were from compromised addresses from around the world. Blocking an entire country usually isn't the preferred method of dealing with spam.

 

[STexan]

Speaking for myself, I like fried spam

 

[Jeff Duda]

As Samuel L Jackson would say; "Im tired of all these blankety blank spam bots on this blankety blank forum"

They're annoying, and seem to pop up once a day. Can we keep them out for good?

Strange. I have yet to see one that I could tell was spam. Seems like all legitimate human users to me.

 

[Mark Blue]

It's a time consuming process of looking at the registrants' profiles and checking them off one by one for approval, made much worse by that fact that we're getting 10-20 Chinese spambot registrants a day. We catch 99.9% of them, but because it's all done by hand, a couple will slip through the cracks now and then. We've put in a request to have a Captcha or more user friendly Captcha alternative put into the registration form to make it easier on us to go through the registrants. Hopefully Tim will have some time soon to put it in.

Skip hit the nail on the head here guys. It makes the new applicant approval process much more tedious and it adds a workload we really don't need, but we deal with as best we can. Whatever the solution ends up being, it can't get here soon enough (trust me).