Countermeasures against forum spam

[fyr77]

Hello everyone,

I am fyr77 and I am temporarily assisting Kyodai in managing the forum, since he currently does not have a lot of free time. I have deleted around 2500 (!) bot accounts from this site yesterday, including their spam messages. I hope I have not accidentally deleted any legitimate users, but if your account got deleted please create a new one and reply to this post, so I can attempt to restore your posts from the database backup.

Since the captcha mechanisms included in phpBB (the forum software used here) are all broken by bots already, I have decided to switch to hCaptcha for new sign-ups - this seems to be working, at least for now.

Have a great day!

[bttr]

Thanks a lot!

[fyr77]

So, hCaptcha doesn't seem to be doing much anymore. Over the last 2 weeks we had over 100 spam accounts sign up, thankfully all posts were caught by Akismet (which has been doing a great job, so yay!).

I'm conducting a test with a different anti-bot mechanism, let's see how well that will work. Maybe it'll save me the work of deleting dozens of fake users every two weeks.