[squeakland] Re: forum spam

[sidney]

Teefal,

Are you sure that it is humans registering and not bots? I admin several web boards and I have found that there are bots that are able to register on the common boards, including PHPBB, solving the CAPTCHA images within seconds, responding to the email verifcation, and then posting messages.

I have found a simple mechanism that stops all of those bots I have yet encountered at the expense of requiring real users to have Javascript enabled when they register. Javascript would not be required for your users for any other use of the forum other than the actual registration. I have yet to find a bot that runs Javascript.

With some forum software I modify the registration form myself, but there is a published antispam mod for PHPBB2 that happens to require users to be running Javascript and that takes care of everything that is necessary.

The mod is called hashcash, and you can find it at http://www.phpbbhacks.com/download/8649

I just found out about EToys, looked here to see if my son, who has been programming in Scratch, would be interested, and saw the horrendous spam problem you have been having. I hope this suggestion helps you. I know that hashcash or any other mechanism that requires Javascript can be exceptionally effective at stopping the registration bots when nothing else has worked.




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(from forum)
http://squeakland.org/forums/viewtopic.php?p=9696#9696

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