Topic: Captcha

With this recent spate of spam threads that have popped up, I wonder if it's time to institute some kind of Captcha into the Asylum's signup or thread-posting page. This, of course, is assuming that they're all posted by bots. The server logs should be able to tell us if the submission page was accessed directly, or navigated to by the origin IP of the threads. Either way, we've got to find some way to stop them. I just deleted three or four threads directly.


Justice 4 Pat Richard

I don't mind implementing a captcha sysstem - right now there is no spam protection at all (I just fiddled with the field names the last time)...
but I have no time right now to do anything about it ( thesis is due in 21 days.... sell me a month of the calendar. Please.


What a quick glance into the database told me though, is that our spammer seems to prefer @yahoo.com addresses - and as far as I know
yahoo already uses a captcha. He apperantly is able to bypass that one. (and he needs a valid address to sign up to the asylum...)

Yahoo probably uses a typical visual captcha.

I get the impression that these spams are not automated... that is, it is an actual person signing up and then posting spam messages. The only way to stop such a spammer is to simply ban him or her, but I don't know what the policy is on that. Last I remember, banning was a sensitive issue at the Asylum.

well, banning individuals who at least had something to do with the communita has been a historical no-no.

I see spammers not as community members...
alas, banning the individual users won't have much effect - we don't do it, and the spammer *still* creates a new account each time
(and there's no easy way to prevent a person that has unlimted e-mail addresses from signing up under a new name...)