6 Responses

1. Gurock

   29|Nov|2006 1

   Use PHP 3.0 Beta instead of the older forum software. PHP 3.0 has much better spam protection and CAPTCHA technology.

2. johhny from utah

   01|Dec|2006 2

   What kinds of anti-spammer measures did you implement? There are some really good capcha packages around.

3. Mike S.

   08|Jan|2007 3

   You could use one of free “visual Turing tests” available on the Web to prevent bots from registering new users.

   These free tools give you an image that contains letters and/or numbers, include a place for a human being to type in what they see in the image, and have a button to click on to “verify” what they’ve typed. (Google for “CAPTCHA”)

   If you believe the W3C, visual Turing tests are “bad”, as they are both “easy to subvert” and they “discriminate against visually-impared and/or dyslexic individuals”. (I submit that dyslexic individuals are not hindered by this test any more than they are hindered by written text on your webpage!) I believe that the W3C is performing a FUD campaign of their own to discredit this workable, and still maturing, technology.

   If we substitute the images, and ask for things like - “What’s in the foreground of the following picture?”, or “What article of clothing is blue in the following picture?”, or “What color is the dog in the following picture?” - or something like this, we’ll have a good way to determine whether the webuser is a human or a bot.

   - Mike S.

4. Billy

   30|Jan|2007 4

   The latest offering from Invision, IPB 2.2.1 has a number of new features to stop spammer bots, and does a good job of it. If you’re interested I can also find you the name of a site that does an add-on for Invision forums that tracks bot sites and automatically blocks them.

   Billy

5. Dave

   08|Apr|2007 5

   Thanks for the suggestions guys, and sorry for the time it has taken to respond.

   I have to admit that I am in the ‘CAPTCHA is bad’ camp, as it clearly does discriminate against the visually impaired who use screen reading tools. We don’t have much of a problem with spam on this blog, because Akismet is so efficient at weedling out the spam itself. The answer I think lies in combatting the spam at the server rather than user level: why should we make people jump through hoops to contribute to our website?

   Anyway, many thanks for the recommendations. One of the main issues was that the forum just wasn’t being used, if it was then we might have been able to live with the spam! But if there is a massive cry out for a new forum, then we’ll give one of these options a go.

6. maik

   12|Jun|2007 6

   Thanks a bunch!m