IA/bots/spam

[DR]

Apologies to any new (legit) users I may have pruned today.
As I began taking out new accounts with multiple spammy posts, I noted that there were pages upon pages to go. The highest number of posts by a single new account I noted was 49(!).
So I decided to pull a list of all >2025-09-23 accounts (about 400 0f them), search one for posts, use that URL in Excel to create similar URLs for searching all new accounts and then I spot checked many. They were all either spammy or no post at all.
I started to spare the "no post" accounts but then noted multiple accounts with slightly different names, and found spam tied to them, so I pruned all of the new accounts.

Open to suggestions to keep the spammers at bay more effectively...

[DR]

fyi - reuse of email addresses has been disabled. I've increased time between posts too.

[sbashkyrtsev]

Seems like the orcs keep coming (: Maybe turn off the registration for a day or two?

[DR]

Hopefully, it does not come to that. I did make a couple of additional minor changes that might help a little.

Tom is retired, does not do forum stuff anymore.
Who is "in charge" these days?

In total there are 598 users online :: 5 registered, 0 hidden and 593 guests (based on users active over the past 5 minutes)
Most users ever online was 2498 on Thu Sep 25, 2025 4:12 am
This is scary... Orcs indeed!

[DR]

Messed w/ the sign up requirements, seems to have the orcs confused, at least momentarily.
May need to try to create a test account to make sure someone sincere still can.

[bunnahabhain]

Hi DR
Looks like you managed to get the orcs under control. Thanks a lot for the efforts to make the forum usable again!
Jörg

[lmh]

Thank you for your efforts! Although I don't come here as often as I used to, this is still an excellent forum, and I'd miss it greatly.

[Peter Apps]

Can you set up automatic keyword recognition that will suspend or block anyone who uses the word T e m u for example?

[Hollow]

Thanks for the effort.

I don't know if a 2FA would keep bots away and if it could be implemented here

Edit:
Found some discussions on phpbb forum.

https://www.phpbb.com/community/viewtopic.php?t=2654560



Maybe one needs to make use of a "newly registered users (NRU) group together with a Q&A captcha for registering (maybe for every post)

Something like:
- the first 3-5 posts of a new user must be validated by an admin/moderator.
- users in NRU-group cannot create more than 1-2 discussions within a day
- single posts need to wait a certain time e.g. 30-60min/submit
- posts from NRUs need a Q&A or other captcha to submit a post
- post from NRU cannot contain links

Maybe one can set-up different NRU-groups with different threshold levels
E.g. only the first post must be validated,
links allowed only after 10 posts, captchas for 5 post etc.

After that, they become regular users with no validations or time restrictions

Of course, this will increase more work for the admin/mods but it may be easier to collect the post requests in a separate email-box than to have the board flooded and delete them afterwards.

I don't know what rules can be set-up on the boards-server

[DR]

I am also not sure how many of your suggestions are "doable" with the current software, but I know that captcha has been added and I've put the NU on a short leash, which has cut down on the numbers of posts new accounts can add.
Our benevolent overlord has been very helpful with this issue!