Okay, the spammers win... for now...

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Venomous
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Okay, the spammers win... for now...

Post by Venomous » Sun Dec 08, 2013 12:10 pm

Alright, I'm a big enough man to know when I've been got by the balls... the spam on this forum has officially got out of hand, with almost 200 active spam accounts and gods only know how many spam threads and posts this past month alone.

So, effectively immediately, all new accounts are going to be admin approved only, and believe me when I say that all admin approval requests are going to straight to my Trash folder. We have not had ONE SINGLE legitimate new user post here these past months, and I believe we're unlikely to get any anytime soon.

These spammers are craftier than ever. Due to the fact that they are passing an email legitimacy verification AND getting past our image CAPTCHA, I believe the accounts are actually being manually created by real people, and THEN blasted with spambots all over the place. I've banned whole email domains (including *@hotmail.com and *@gmail.com!) and whole IP blocks, but they just keep coming. They're posting faster than seajayjay and I can delete them, so we're going to need some more effective strategies.

I'll be looking into a few countermeasures in the new year to help stem the spam flow. First of all we will need to update phpBB to the latest version - this is long overdue. Then we will install some kind of one-click banhammer module that will ban usernames, IP addresses, email addresses, AND delete all the offending user's posts all at once. That will greatly simplify the cleanup process and allow us to keep one step ahead of these assholes. Lastly, I will look into a more effective CAPTCHA system - one that most definitely will take a real person with half a brain to get by, and hence totally ruling out the possibility of bot registrations.

Anyhow, in the meantime, we thank you for your patience in navigating through and around the spam as we work to clean up this mess. Existing members will notice no restrictions during this time, only new signups will be moderated/blocked.

If you are reading this and would like to join our forum but can't sign up, please use the Contact Form to send me a message with your desired username and I will personally create you an account with a temporary password within 12-18 hours.

Also, please feel free to check out Social Deviancy on Facebook for news, updates, pics of hot girls, and any other unusual garbage we may post. =)

Adios!
- Venomous -

The internet is a tool, and so are most of the people who use it...

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