fdsman, I'm not sure if you've ever actually seen the in's and out' of administering a forum but there are all sorts of methods available to stop or at least slow down the spam bots.fdsman wrote:Well, its not that their moderators aren't good, its the fact that the spam bots have the forum locked in their sights, and manage to register a new account in less then 5 seconds, posting a new thread with "Hello I am new" or "Enlarge your organ, dvd sale"kman wrote:If a forum is getting hit with spam, they're not doing a good job of administering their board.
For lower-traffic forums, like here, you can stick with catchas, special security questions, and manual verification of new accounts...all the stuff I do here.
But if you run a higher-traffic forum, there are other options that let you block posting from all new accounts until they reach a pre-set number of posts. Until they hit that number, all of their posts must be manually approved.
That's just one way and I'm sure there are others. I'm not saying it'll stop spambots completely but if the owner of the forums and the moderators are on the ball, the amount of spam will be very small and extremely short-lived.
Anyone who puts up a forum with automatically-approved accounts and no control over new user postings is just begging for spam.
