Spambots are getting through - ohama in a bar upside down

[tghe-retford]

The Youth Club is starting to be over-run by spambots who are setting up accounts to spread link spam, and for once, its not my incomprehensible mumblings.

It is getting
very annoying
seeing random
links in made-up
articles sprouting
on multiple lines
like this with catchy
titles to up the
link spam for someone
else to
confuse me

Just bringing this up to the attention of any moderator to a) ban the accounts and b) possibly integrate some kind of security feature (ie. type the letters and numbers in an image you see when you sign up to many sites nowadays and indeed in many VBulletin forums I use) to prevent the spambots getting through.

Yeah, it's been really bad lately. As fast as we delete a spam account, another one appears

[Arfed]

Add a question to the registration form: What does the abbreviation SA mean?

Should get rid of all the spambots

Sounds like a good idea. One for Anne (our administrator) to consider, perhaps.

[tghe-retford]

It might work, as long as real people are made aware of what SA is an abbreviation of in the context of social anxiety (and not say, South Africa, Saudi Arabia or Systems Analyst).

[tghe-retford]

What I was referring to in a previous post is a system known as CAPTCHA:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Captcha

And it looks like this:



And VBulletin does have CAPTCHA (what they call a image verification system) available in the latest version: http://www.vbulletin.com/forum/showthread.php?t=209218

Unfortunately, Anne isn't around much at the moment but I'm sure she'll reply to this thread when she gets the time

[anne123456]

We did this about 6 months ago or more-I forget what the question is but something along the lines of 1 +1 = ... (to check the 'humaness' of the registrant) It helped a lot, but now they are getting through again
We also have the image verification activated, but not the fanciest version as, tbh, I can't make out the numbers/letters they are portraying.
Anne