Incase you haven't noticed the flood of suspicious new topics...

[Maxaxle]

We've been had. Someone figured out how to register a billion new spambot accounts and now I can't find anything useful.

Any ideas?

[megariffer]

it was only a few bots, but they made >500 posts each.
i deleted everything, so forum should be as good as new.

[cdoublejj]

Thank You.  ;D I remember having to delete them 1 one by one before we got the new forums.  :P

[Maxaxle]

Well, are there any decent measures to keep them out? I remember awhile back on another forum (the Egoboo forum) I made a suggestion that anyone who wants to register should have to score three or five points in an extremely easy game that you literally cannot lose, i.e. "Drive this car over there", or maybe an easy mini-golf game, anything that doesn't automatically let the player win and cannot be read by bots. Maybe a text adventure where you have to unlock a door with a key?

EDIT: Oh FFS, there's another one, in the General Chat section.

[megariffer]

thanks for your suggestion, we are using multiple anti-spam measures, i thought they will be enough to keep spammers away. more or less it was a success, since there were not too many of them around.
that means one spammer/month roughly.
still, i did some steps forward in the direction to this brave new spamless world we all crave.
updated forums to newest version (we were 2 versions behind), and introduced the fancy keycaptcha service, i'm very interested if it will keep these bots away.

(btw how bots can register is beyond me. recaptcha, email verification, spam database filtering... they surely are exploiting some security holes in the forum engine)

hope this works out eventually. have a wonderful week, y'all!

[cdoublejj]

Sometimes the spammers/users are registered by real people.

[Maxaxle]

Sometimes the spammers/users are registered by real people.

Yeah, but who in the world would just smash their keyboard to name it? Obviously they're not planning all that well. Someone who plans would just type "genericname[last two digits of DOB]".

[cdoublejj]

I think they register by hand then let the bots do the spamming.