Increase in spam lately...

It seems there's been an increase in spam to the forums lately, posted by guests.

How much of an inconvenience would it be to potential new legitimate HPC:Factor members to register before being granted the privilege of posting to the forums?

If registration were required before posting, the spam would probably diminish...

Just a suggestion...

RLW

Yes, it's got to be annoying even for me now.

I usually click on the most recent posts links when I come here and 50% of them today have been driveby spam and mass porn links.

It's fine to ask people to respect the forums when posting as guests, but I'm starting to think there needs to be some kind of fallback plan when people decide not to be respectful.

There's a thread for this discussion, where this has been discussed at length:

http://www.hpcfactor.com/forums/forums/thread-view.asp?tid=103&start=346

Some steps were taken back then; maybe more are needed now.

Yes - sadly I agree. It is essential to get new people in; we don't want to be a gated community of fossils who can't move on. And also I often post without logging in if I see a question I can answer; in fact it's only recently I've even bothered to sign up. But I can't see that any random wanderer is going to be that amazed about discontinued computers that they can't wait a few minutes before posting.

I can't stand those stupid noobs trying to get money by those links. I hate them


I think you should HAVE to register.

what i like about this forum is that you don't have to register to post - and the spammers already have to enter the number codes to post (mmm a little annoying when using gprs), so i think all that spam is done manually, hence the mandatory registration won't help in the least.

but why aren't other forums flooded with spam like this then? i don't remember if you have to confirm registration via email, if not, that could be an explanation. (and then mandatory registration, which is made more secure, could help )

or another idea, maybe other forums do get this much spam but it doesn't seem much as the forums themselves are a lot larger. no idea, just guessing.

Edited by cmonex 2006-12-18 7:28 AM

.....or maybe it's because there is greater member activity on this forum than there is on lager ones?

Edited by Hurricane John 2006-12-18 7:39 AM

This is getting quite annoying. And don't worry we are no0t all fossils. i am only 16

The forum has probably been added to their list of susceptible sites, and it's only a matter of time before there's spam everywhere. Those number codes are not at all distorted, and so are easily readable by automated spam bots. They have to be the obnoxious captchas that are barely readable by a human, like some other forums and sites have, to try to prevent it. Posts by guests should have to be approved by a moderator, and if the moderators don't want to do that amount of work, then registration should be required.

isotherm, oh that sounds scary. btw, i wonder if the posting system is easily hackable as well (i.e. they might've found a way to avoid entering the codes).

I wouldn't think they hacked anything... The codes are readable with simple OCR. All the other captchas around are difficult even for a human to read, for that reason - spambots have OCR engines for them.

Edited by isotherm 2006-12-19 3:10 PM

then that's good news easy to fix