Possible spam solutions

[mewletter]

Since recent spam attacks, here are some suggestions to make spammers much harder to flood the forum.

IP Ban. Of course is a little drastic, but seems to be effective in some MMO games, why not in a forum?

Limit registration. All future registration will be through invitation only, thus much harder for spammers create multiple accounts to spam.

Cooldown period between posting. A 5 to 20 minute cooldown should enough to discourage all the sub-board being flooded by spammers.

Track and sue. I'm sure a few lawyers will love to make a lawsuit against these spammers, after all, we know what happen to the 'king of Viagra spam' a few years back?

Any other suggestions would be nice.

[Kyrosan]

Another option is to require the use of security images to post anything.

[xythan_shadow]

It makes me a sad panda that our home is being invaded like this. We need to rally some pitchforks and torches.

[228642]

How about a conditional spam blocker like www.recaptcha.com? have it set up to appear when there are a certain amount of posts in a certain amount of time?

[228642]

Originally Posted by mewletter

Track and sue. I'm sure a few lawyers will love to make a lawsuit against these spammers, after all, we know what happen to the 'king of Viagra spam' a few years back?

I apologize for the multiple post but are we talking about the spammer that killed himself?

[mewletter]

Nope. Just a very rich and devious spammer who got caught and charged in court for his crime. (Anton F. Pusztai in 2001; in case you want to know that bastard anyway)

[Geek2Jock]

I think a captcha is the best solution; to my knowledge, this kind of mass spamming is a highly automated process and adding the manual element should send spammers looking for easier targets.

[Yachirobi]

Captcha is the way to go. Does the site need money for it? I say we each donate a dollar (or euro or loonie or whatever) or two if necessary

[philat99]

I just looked up captcha and it does look good as long as segmentation is used. Isn't it a sorry state that entire companies are working on ways to read even these?
Mike

[mewletter]

Doesn't matter as long there's legal money to be made. But do you think we really NEED that service that badly?

[TeknoDave]

We are still looking into the CAPTCHA as an option. We have gone so far as blocking even partial IP addresses, as many of them have similar digits in the first two segments (ie: 123.456.x.x)

I am not employed, so as soon as I get an email alert that there is a spam post, and I nuke it immediately.