i mean, seriously? this forum, however cool it is already (it's on my startup tabs), has 58 registered members and something like a 10% bot population. it's scary.
what adbots? I love banning users, lemme at 'em! Just kidding. We're trying really hard to keep the riff-raff out, but can't kick everyone... I just banned a user this morning for yucky eww postings.
I just spent some time going through and deleting a bunch of the bot accounts. Feel free to post suspect accounts. We have moderation turned on for the first few posts so a lot of times we are nuking the posts and not nuking the account itself. Also I just banned anyone from a .ru email address from signing up. Sorry Russians but every single signup from your country has been a spam bot.
maybe add in somewhere on the signup page that if they're from .ru they can email you in order to confirm they are a real person?
heheh, the population has fallen from 57 to 45 -- GJT! also, for now i'm cool with having my posts checked before they go public. [EDIT:] lolol! it appears that my posts are no longer being checked.
If someone with a .ru address wants to get on I can add an exception. They can also just use a gmail address or something like that if they don't want to bother with that.
We had the same problem on SupComUniverse (now migrated to insidesupcom.de). We had enough staff to handle it but after a while it got really annoying, 20 bots per day or something. What really helped was an additional question added to the registration: How many human factions are in SupCom? Even with a hint (the faction names) it was to much for the bots to overcome. Worked wonders, spam post went from over 9000 to nil instantly. I even took down the Captcha pic, it wasnt needed anymore. If you can do it in phpBB, thats the way to go imo. It's less annoying than the Captcha pics too.
