intfiction.org

I think perhaps this forum should use the Newly Registered Users group, so any new poster has to post a sensible post that gets signed off by a moderator, before being allowed to post freely.

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ADRIFT Developer developer.

I personally think that'd be too harsh, but someone new to the forum seeking for help should maybe cope with one post only for the first... 15 minutes or so.

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Wenn man in einschlägigen Frauen- oder Lifestyle-Zeitschriften von Apfel-, Birnen- oder Pfirsich-Popos liest, dann frage ich mich immer, ob ich der einzig Sehende auf den Kürbis­feldern deutscher Innenstädte bin.

If you 'view new posts' you will see that some loony called pseupssigue has just become a member and sent 21 junk posts in half an hour.

It's safe to guess that that's what Campbell is referring to. You just have to keep two types of people in mind - the spam-o-bot nobody wants and the guy who's new to IF and has a question.

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Wenn man in einschlägigen Frauen- oder Lifestyle-Zeitschriften von Apfel-, Birnen- oder Pfirsich-Popos liest, dann frage ich mich immer, ob ich der einzig Sehende auf den Kürbis­feldern deutscher Innenstädte bin.

The spam accounts are probably a big pain for the administrata to deal with (and pretty annoying to some live human users, although I find them mildly amusing most of the time) but whitelists, waiting periods, and that kind of thing can be huge, huge deterrents for new live human users, even on forums much more active than this one.

Grueslayer's solution is probably the safest one I've heard of, but I think it's still a really big risk.

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we gotta move these refrigerators

Looking at the Register page, there's not even a CAPTCHA set up. I know they're annoying and also aren't 100% reliable, but the combination of CAPTCHA and simple question (on my forum, simply "Type the number 7 in this box") has dramatically reduced the amount of spam on my forums.

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Quest - create and play text adventure games in your browser

I should also add, blocking spammer IPs works well too. I've found they often come from the same limited IP ranges.

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Quest - create and play text adventure games in your browser

Well, there's this:

http://lithiumstudios.org/forum/viewtop ... f=31&t=941

I'm pretty sure there's also a Honey Pot mod.

reCaptcha is built into phpBB3, but it's been cracked already. Plus if it's a human registration, that won't help.

The only thing that I've ever had to stop 99.9% of spam traffic is to put a question on the forum that only someone interested in the forum's content would know or care to go find out. I believe that idea has already been shot down.

It's a shame there's no way to auto-ban anyone who fills in an ICQ address.

It might be time to change the secret question, at any rate. The spam problem has gotten markedly worse here in the last two weeks.

One issue is that although we moderators can ban accounts, we can't delete them altogether. So those accounts still show up in the members list, along with a link to whatever site they are hawking.

That may make this board relatively more attractive as a target.

Possibility that it may be time to re-evaluate some things...? Including mod permissions.