A call for Moderators

[charles]

The best anti-spam method I've ever heard of are customised questions.

Sometimes they seriously hire "humans" to get past the authentication and make up user accounts for bots to use later. Obviously this stops any kind of image, calculation or e-mail check from working together with common knowledge questions. But with Customised questions you can ask things relating to the forum, website or comic.

EG:
What is Commandar Tyrell's first name? - Kari
What is the name of the Niobid's first ship? - Niobe
The Crimson Dark logo is used by the "WHAT" Alliance? - Cirin
Who, of the main characters, has the most Augmentations? - Whisper
What is the first name of Vaegyr's wife? - Larissa
Hal Grisdale has a bionic "WHAT"? - eye
etc.

Easy things that ANY reader would likely know, even if they've only read a little of Crimson Dark, but which would confuse a non-reader/fan and bots.

[Vile]

In Seoul with the slooow netbook right now, so you guys will have to handle the spammers for this week!

[Vile]

Aaand ... back again. Looks pretty clean around here.

Don't know what the best place to post this would be, but I've spotted a broken link. If you try to access the forums from the Database, you get sent to what I presume must be the old forum page:

http://www.nightgig.com/forum/viewforum ... e96096562d

[Vile]

Oh, boy, that was a mega banning-and-deleting session! David, I think you really need to look into some anti-spambot registration methods, it's getting hard to keep up. Especially now that I can't do it at work since the Russian porn spam showed up.

[David]

I'm thinking of switching to vBulliten, I understand it's much more secure.

[charles]

Spot this thread:

viewtopic.php?f=3&t=310&p=2254#p2254

Guy asking for how he can advertise on the site. Suppose it's David who needs to respond but I can't help wondering if its a spammer strategy to make you think twice about deleting the message since there are links in the signature to outside sites.

A good anti-spam strategy is a blacklist. We just installed one on the erfwiki and it's brilliant. Its an actual blacklist against posts/edits which prevent people from posting if their message contains a URL thats blacklisted.

Beyond that you can remove the incentive for them to spam with the robots.txt file by excluding the forum from search engines like Google.

[David]

Jsut a heads-up: I've updated the forum to the latest version of phpBB, and I've now configured it to use reCAPTCHA, so hopefully we should see less spam in the future.

[Vile]

Just checked back in after a week in Hokkaido - welcome welcome-back news!