Fighting the spam some more

Published on 27th January 2013 13:07

4 Comments

Spam bots are getting smarter everyday. We've been using a re-captcha for forum registrations for some time now. It worked ok-ish, but was never perfect. Bots still came in and posted their spam messages from time to time which we then had to clean up after them.

So I have switched the forum from re-captcha to a random question which will be asked during registration. I'm hoping humans are intelligent enough to answer the question, but bots are not.

I've you're curious what the question is, log out and hit the register button

Also I have removed the IP banlist on the forum which has gotten ginormous. The reason being that I've banned quite a few IP ranges which might contain people who have done nothing wrong. If we're being overwhelmed with spam in the coming days, I'll put it back.

Tags: updates

4 Comments

Pernix_8D - 27th January 2013, 13:40
- Reply
Awesome.
Maybe you could make a bunch of questions and randomise it to make it much harder for the bots to get past registration?

Probably not needed, but still? :P

InsaneJ - 27th January 2013, 13:46
- Reply
That's the first thing I thought as well, but unfortunately I can't do that without installing additional plugins which is something I'd rather not do.

The vBulletin community isn't as good at keeping plugins up-to-date as the Minecraft community is