Volga Hydrofoils Messageboard

We need a tool against these bandits!
I clean every week approximately 10 - 20 spams!

We can protect the forum from bots by making it more difficult to register an account. But as we make it more difficult for the bots, we also make it more difficult for real people. Earlier I changed the code in such a way that people had to fill in the captcha-code in reverse - stopped every single spambot, but apparently also some bona-fide people...

And then of course there is also a legion of manual spammers. People who get paid to go from forum to forum to create an account and to post the spam messages. There are whole armies of those in China, and looks like they're also coming from Russia/GIS now. It's going to be very difficult to stop and/or automatically clean the spam of these human 'bandits'.

Perhaps for now I could put back the spambot-killing reverse captcha, and make a more clear instruction for the bona-fide users how to create an account. Perhaps this will even also block some of those manual spammers, who are not going to be bothered to spend extra time to read through instructions.

What do you think?

Maurits

Hi Mauritz,

It is enough if we have one simple tool to block a spammer. He can not enter then with the same name and needs to apply for a new one.
If I catch one of his messages we will block him. That is enough. There are mainly the same names that come in with their spam.

Do not make the entry more complicated. As you can see from many users, they are not aware of most of the functions of the site. Including me. It is meaningless to complicate things as we will then have no more applicants for our site. (There are people like Croatian Dinko and German Gerd that prefer to write me e-mails rather than entering something in the site. Some of them coming with valuable infos. They are either too lazy or it is too complicate for them - or both.)

Block sender is simplest and best.

best regards,
Georg

There is one more intruding spammer called outman007, who ads for golf clubs. He came in with 4 messages. I deleted one of them leaving you the rest. Maybe there should be also one tool which not only blocks these m.f.s. but erases automatically whatever they have sent up to now.

br
g

Hi Georg,

When I see a spammer I usually just click on his name, and then you see the details of that user, including a 'button' that says [ Administrate user ]. Click on that and then log into the Administrative Console, and there you should find near the bottom of the page an option to 'Delete User' and an extra option to 'Delete all posts' of that user. This cleans up all messages of the user at once, and deletes the account, so in this case the spammer also has to create a new account before being able to post another spam message.

However, spambots have no problem creating another new account with some random username within a fraction of a second, so this does not help much against bots. Just humans. A bit. Bloody spammers.

Cheers,
Maurits