Member Question - how do we filter the spam account activations?
- Thread starter knapplc
- Start date
AR Husker Fan
Team HuskerBoard
There are basically four ways:
1. IP addresses. Every time we ban an IP or an IP range, that means anyone trying to register using either can't.
2. Email addresses. Same as for the IP - we can ban a specific email address or a domain (like hotmail.com).
3. There is an anti-spam service set up through the Control Panel. As each IP.Board flags an account as spam, it goes to a central server at IP.Board and is then "read" by each IP.Board that is using the service.
4. The CAPTCHA requirement on registration. This requires each registrant to enter a string of information that is displayed on the screen when they register. Stops bots. However, zoogies and I have tested it, and for whatever reason it wasn't working. I don't know if zoogies has looked at it since then, but so far as I know it still doesn't work.
1. IP addresses. Every time we ban an IP or an IP range, that means anyone trying to register using either can't.
2. Email addresses. Same as for the IP - we can ban a specific email address or a domain (like hotmail.com).
3. There is an anti-spam service set up through the Control Panel. As each IP.Board flags an account as spam, it goes to a central server at IP.Board and is then "read" by each IP.Board that is using the service.
4. The CAPTCHA requirement on registration. This requires each registrant to enter a string of information that is displayed on the screen when they register. Stops bots. However, zoogies and I have tested it, and for whatever reason it wasn't working. I don't know if zoogies has looked at it since then, but so far as I know it still doesn't work.
zoogs
New member
There's both an image CAPTCHA and a Security Question, but both work. I believe it was just that it wasn't stopping some of the spammers, because they actually were humans who were getting token payments for spamming forums with links, something like that. There's nothing either can do about this, since they're designed just to stifle the robots. .
What actually doesn't work, I think, is IP's anti-spam service. I think a license is required for that, and ours is either expired or we never had one. This was disabled until I enabled it a year or more ago, so to my knowledge we've never been able to make use of it.
I think there are only so many actual people who are both willing to spam and find our forum of all the forums out there, so we've been combating these guys manually as AR detailed above. The CAPTCHAs probably do pretty good work in sorting out the robots. It helps that the security question is a little atypical, i.e, it's "Enter the date you see below, *except* for the last digit: 3-15-2009" or something like that.
What actually doesn't work, I think, is IP's anti-spam service. I think a license is required for that, and ours is either expired or we never had one. This was disabled until I enabled it a year or more ago, so to my knowledge we've never been able to make use of it.
I think there are only so many actual people who are both willing to spam and find our forum of all the forums out there, so we've been combating these guys manually as AR detailed above. The CAPTCHAs probably do pretty good work in sorting out the robots. It helps that the security question is a little atypical, i.e, it's "Enter the date you see below, *except* for the last digit: 3-15-2009" or something like that.