subpixel
Re: Spam :(
Reply #4 - Feb 8th , 2010, 10:16am
I created a PHPBB bulletin board for a small handful of people to share messages after my dad died, and it had new users signing up to spam it almost straight away... just about ever day, more accounts... I can only assume it is automated, since anyone looking at the site would realise there is essentially zero value in spamming it. Damn annoying as well. I've heard that there are IT/spam sweatshops where employees make about $2 a day to manually 'crack' something like 1000 captcha-like spam protections. How can you compete with that? One answer is to raise the bar higher. Rather than allow an account to be self activated, just start with email verification, then make the user must write a 'letter' explaining why they want an account. If that passes the sniff test, then let them post, and make the first so-many posts by a user moderated; moderators will probably smell a rat with these bogus one-line off-topic / nonsensical posts and have another chance to delete them. If it really is a legitimate user, they can email again. The benefit (that I see) in making people email the site, is that spam filters seem to be pretty good these days. I can't imagine any readily-available bulletin-board system competing with the spam filters on, say, gmail, which has the advantage of looking at millions of emails to millions of other users to see patterns of spammers. Well, that is assuming that the number new legitimate users is reasonably small. In this case, I imagine that the "100" users now where 95 are bogus is more annoying to delete the 95 bogus ones than it would be to specifically allow just the 5 legit users. -spxl