Everyday Systems

Don't be concerned if the last 5 or so new bulletin board accounts always seem to be spam. I'm not letting the site go to pot, I delete them within 24 hours. It's just they keep on registering new ones. If you scroll down past the first few new users on the memberlist, you'll see the list looks much cleaner.

I need to find a way to delete or block these accounts automatically because it's irritating to have to manually delete them every day. It shouldn't be hard, it's very obvious which accounts are spam. I just want to be careful not to block or delete legitimate users.

Reinhard

What a pain in the S!

Have a nice day Rein
Deb

Hmm, it sems like a lot of new sites I register on these days have some sort of graphic with a word on it... something that is apparently easy for a human to read but difficult to read programmatically. Wonder if sometihng like that could prevent those accounts from being created in the first place?

I think one of the sites I saw that used that was Ticketmaster, when you actually search for tickets it shows that graphic and makes you enter the text.

Then again, there's probably a patent and hefty royalty... so you may have to wait until you get rich from book sales before going that route.

The graphic is there already (I get lots of complaints about it from visually impaired people!) but the spammers have moved to the next level in the technological arms race and their bots can now read these (probably more reliably than people can).

But they do seem to be total, predictable, illiterate idiots about that data they fill in. I think I could easily muck with the code to block 95% of them. I'm just afraid I might also block some total, predictable, illiterate human idiots whom we want to welcome here .

Reinhard

Hmm, why do I have an image of Wharf saying, "Captain, they've adapted!" all of the sudden??

I suppose you could make your tool and run it as a dry-run for a while, and see what it's accuracy rate is and once it's good enoguh let it in. But yeah, you're absolutely right, it's better to let a few spammers in than to block some legitimate human.

I run a phpBB board too and I found that most of my spammers were coming from the same host domain. I IP identified them before deleting their accounts, and also noted what email address they used to sign up. I banned those domains, and now I haven't had a spammer in months.

Conveniently, there's an article on Slashdot about foiling email harvesters:

http://it.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/11/12/2048219

Some of the suggested techniques are applicable to signups, if you're looking for ideas.

Thanks for the suggestions... I think one of my problems is I never seem to have more than 15 minutes at a time to deal with this. I'll try the ips. I've got a bunch of email patterns blacklisted, and that seemed to have worked for a while, but those are so easy to change.