New user creation suspended

[alexei]

Just do something custom to login procedure. I mean something unique, not from phpBB or other well known engine known to spammers. I hardly believe they would add special processing just to post to ROS forums.

[EmuandCo]

We have our own procedure. RosCMS Login

[SomeGuy]

So how long is new user creation going to stay disabled?

This may be turning away potentially valuable new community members, although anyone really interested in contributing to the project, and qualified to do it, could find a dozen different ways to contact devs.

[nicekiwi9]

How did the spam get in? Is it actually real humans signing up and posting, or bots?

[nicekiwi9]

I would suggest this:

http://areyouahuman.com/ <---- Not spam. Honest

http://portal.areyouahuman.com/installation/phpbb

[PurpleGurl]

How did the spam get in? Is it actually real humans signing up and posting, or bots?

It may be a combination. Humans sign up and turn it over to bots. It is possible that quite a few spammers are part of a "sleeper cell" that is already here. Another possibility is hijacked accounts. Maybe spyware harvests someone's details on how to get it.

Here is a thought. A number of boards have CAPTCHA challenges for every post. Sure, I would hate to see that here. But what if someone gets that during their first 10-15 posts and then graduates to another member class?

I like the "play through" approach above. It is certainly easier than the CAPTCHA stuff, and yet a little more complex, with play pattern analysis just in case the bots can accurately trace the steps.

[rosfanatic]

Just yesterday I noticed the news section of a personal website was loading very slowly.. 45 seconds actually. Took to poking around in the database and finally figured out spammers had been adding comments to just a few news stories, and ran them up to 40k of them! Deleted everything and locked the sucker down.

[SomeGuy]

It looks like new account creation has been turned back on? I just saw a piece of spam created by a new account.

[wojo664]

Confirmed, register dialog is now online. Checked by clicking on 'Register'

[The123king]

I'm sure it's possible to review all posts by members with 5 posts or less. If they're spam, delete the account, if they're not, make the post public. I guarantee this will cut the viewable spam to (nearly) nothing

[Z98]

This requires that the tagging of accounts with less than X posts was working correctly. It's not.

[EmuandCo]

Impossible. Most spam accounts here created more than 15 posts in a day. Thus we cant use that as a argument for spam accounts.

[milon]

Impossible. Most spam accounts here created more than 15 posts in a day. Thus we cant use that as a argument for spam accounts.

Sounds like they post more frequently than human accounts. If you watch the number of posts/hour for an account that is less than 100hrs old, you'll see clear trends between human and bot activity, I think. (That could be implemented with the new site, though - no need to go to all that work for something that will be deprecated in the nearish future.)

[EmuandCo]

That might be possible though...