Kill all spammers

[jonoxer]

Hey folks,

My apologies about the crazy amounts of spam that we've attracted already. I haven't wanted to do this because it puts up a barrier to legitimate users, but I've just enabled the option in the forum system to require manual administrator approval of all new registrations. The time required to ban spammers and delete their posts is a real pain, and I hate having it there polluting the forum. I'll clean up the existing spam ASAP and hopefully the new manual-approval mechanism will minimise it in future.

Thanks for understanding.
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Jon

[cef]

Definitely appreciate it Jon.

BTW: As you've probably noticed, I've been reporting all the spam I've seen. I'm sure a few of would be quite happy to help out on things like this if you go back to automatic registrations (hopefully with a bit fewer spammers).

PS: I've seen some forums that allow you you to mark an account as a spammer. The account doesn't get deleted, but none of the posts they make actually get posted (they all go to /dev/null). Spammer thinks they have a valid account, so their bots don't bother creating a new one.

[LukeW]

Jon, if you want to, maybe you could add a couple of other regular contributors here to the administrator or moderator list or whatever phpBB calls it, the list of users with the privileges to delete spam posts etc. I would be happy to work on this, and I'm sure other people would too. That way spam can be cleaned up faster and you don't have to carry all the workload.

But then again if you've enabled manual registration approval maybe that solves the problem anyway.

[jonoxer]

Cef and LukeW, thanks for your comments. I'd actually had in mind that I'd like to make both of you admins (plus AndyG and a couple of others I know personally) but I don't want to just do it without checking first, because it means you'll get confirmation emails whenever new users register.

I've just changed the signup CAPTCHA over to use reCAPTCHA, since it seems the default included with phpBB has been pretty well defeated by spambots. Hopefully reCAPTCHA will work a bit better.

I'm very happy to have extra admins though, and I'm happy to be quite liberal with who gets privileges. The basic rule is that if I've met you in real life, it's likely I'll be happy to make you an admin. If you've met me, and you would like to help out as an admin and don't mind getting notification emails, ping me by [email|forum|phone|Skype] and I'll make it so.
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Jon

[cef]

Cef and LukeW, thanks for your comments. I'd actually had in mind that I'd like to make both of you admins (plus AndyG and a couple of others I know personally) but I don't want to just do it without checking first, because it means you'll get confirmation emails whenever new users register.

No problems by me. Used to stuff like that since I used to run the LUV mailing lists.

[jonoxer]

Thanks Cef, I've just put you in the Administrators group. Congratulations or commiserations, I don't know which is more appropriate!

At least reCAPTCHA seems to be working. Since yesterday there has been a grand total of 1 registration request, compared to dozens per day that were getting through previously. Given that it's working so well I think I'll switch off the "approve new registrations" option again, and see how we go dealing with spammy posts as they show up.

Cheers
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Jon