Return of the Bots

[eht13]

So the spammers seem to have found us again. I know we've talked about this before, but CAPTCHA is being used to register, right? Wonder how they're getting around that unless humans are registering them. There was also talk at one point of all new members being manually approved. The other thing I was wondering about would be having a simple question asked at registration that any Helmet fan would know, and registration would only be possible if the question was answered correctly. That could be done systematically. Just some ideas...

By the way, are the CAPTCHAs being used up-to-date enough? --> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CAPTCHA

[Poison Pimp]

I would be ok with approving manually all new members...

The specific question would be good too: what's the first name of the band's singer? or something not too complicated for new fans (they can always google the info).

[eht13]

The specific question would be good too: what's the first name of the band's singer? or something not too complicated for new fans (they can always google the info).

Yes, that's what I was thinking... thanks.

[bornannoying]

All the standard verification stuff is definitely in place. Don't know why that's not working, but I agree that manual approval is probably the way forward here. It's not like there's a vast tide of new members every week. I'll implement this now.

Not sure if there's a way of adding a security question but, if we do the approval route, it shouldn't matter anyway.

[Poison Pimp]

I have an old website still in place somewhere, and lately I have been swamped by spams on my old cgi forum.

Anyway, all this to say that since I don't use the website anymore, but wants to keep it up for archiving purpose, I have removed the "post" form, thinking that this way nobody, and especially the spambots, would not be able to post on my forum anymore (nobody could).

Well, guess what? The bots kept posting new topics and new replies even though there was no way they could have had access to the form to do that... which led me to conclude that the spambots do not use the existing forms to post new topics. They probably have access to the php or cgi code, and know what needs to be sent directly to the database, bypassing all our protection system.

So I do not see any escape to this, unless we indeed manually approve new members.