Spam Bot is posting here in forum

[Matthias C. Noc]

Last night a Spam bot has started to post commercial messages as reply to ongoing topics here and in other sections!

[Prime Monster]

We know :-(

[Prime Monster]

I am currently locking all old threads to keep the spammer(s) from adding rubbish there. If you want to add a post to a locked thread please send me a private message and I will unlock it again.

PM

[xilman]

The scum are back

Posting viagra adverts this time, cleverly disguised as a few links in the midst of coherent but inappropriate text quoted from various sources.

Is there a chance of restricting posting by unregistered users? Perhaps they could only initiate a thread but never respond to one. To my mind that would have two advantages. First, the spam could be deleted by flushing the entire thread and you wouldn't have to take care not to damage legitimate material when cleaning up. Second, it's easier on the folk who don't want to plough through this stuff --- they would know that existing threads in which they are interested would be clean.

Paul

[moo]

heres a susgestion ban the ip
the forum software supports banning of ips www.tribes3.org/forums if you read u will hear of tons of peps ips being banned for a week or so.

[Mike]

You can also have one of those random text images that you have to type in to post.

[JuanTutors]

Originally Posted by Mike

You can also have one of those random text images that you have to type in to post.

BAM!! That's always good against bots. If it's a real person, it also gets REALLY annoying and makes them stop, eventually.

[akruppa]

Could clickable links be disabled in postings from unregistered users?

Alex

[Mystwalker]

Originally Posted by akruppa

Could clickable links be disabled in postings from unregistered users?

Alex

That sounds like an excellent idea to me.

[xilman]

Originally Posted by Mystwalker

That sounds like an excellent idea to me.

Except that it doesn't stop the crap from appearing in the forum.


Paul

[JuanTutors]

Originally Posted by Mike

You can also have one of those random text images that you have to type in to post.

By the way, these are really not hard to make. It just takes some extremely simple JavaScript which I could write myself, if it were not that I don't want to spend the 10-15 minutes.

If you don't want to do that, you can even do something as simple as "What is 12 + 59 +74?" without any images.

The point is, the only way any of these really really simple things won't work is if the person making these posts is really really stupid , like if for some reason they are targeting this forum manually.