New Anti-Spam Measures

[Spec8472]

Well, I've just banned the first spammer on the new forums.

As a result of this I've turned on email-address authentication, and a visual CAPTCHA (Completely Automated Public Turing Test to Tell Computers and Humans Apart) code before you can register.

If you see any posts that contain spam (this includes "Get a Free some trendy new product" type links), either in the post itself or in their signature, please report the post.

If you're visually or otherwise impaired, and are unable to complete the CAPTCHA, you can email sennadar-forums@plebian.net with your desired username, and an account will be created for you.


On a side note: I'm going to dump that rEd Bar mod I installed - it breaks much too easily, and just doesn't do the job.

If someone with PHP and PHPbb experience wants to fix it (as in, the mod) - it needs the following:
- HTML Encode values from the database when displaying on the config page,
- Have a seperate link config page on the ACP
- Have a decent field length input for the config page (Atleast 255 chars)
- Allow n URLs to be added, without excessive difficulty or ugliness on the end-result (eg: extra pipes) (probably best to create a seperate table, rather than cloging the config table.)
- Allow allocating URLs to the top, bottom, or both headers.
- Allow re-ordering of URLS.

[Spec8472]

More spam found. This time on the Wiki.

I havn't implemented CAPTCHA there yet though.

[Spec8472]

More spam on the Wiki.

For reference, you should be able to just roll back the changes any spam-bot puts in.
Use the following link: http://wiki.sennadar.plebian.net/index. ... get=Shiz26
and just change the "target" to be the username of your chosen Spammer.

Longer term Solutions:
Implementing a CAPTCHA there isn't going to be easy.

The easiest way is to just stop creation of accounts, except by the admin.

Perhaps the best method would be to get the Sennadar Wiki to use the Sennadar Forum userbase, instead.


Update: Spam on the wiki is now no longer an issue - users cannot register on the Wiki directly, they must now register on the forums first.

[Spec8472]

I've changed a few things to implement some new anti-spam measures to stop bogus account registrations.

If you're having difficulty registering, or updating your profile please send an email to sennadar@plebian.net

Please include the username you're trying to register or update and any error messages displayed.

[Spec8472]

Once again registrations have been switched to require Administrator's Approval.

Looks like the spam bots have defeated my anti-spambot signups for the moment.