Our spam posts are still pretty frequent. Today, I registered on a new forum and was greeted by some fairly obvious spam prevention techniques, as well as a CAPTCHA.



As I was posting a message, I included a URL to an off site page. The site stopped my post and said it looked too spammy for a new user and to remove outside URL's. I was impressed. It also stopped me from embedding more than three quotes within each other. But, that's a separate issue.

Most of our spam these days are odd necro posts, some with links others without (but with signature links). I think if we restrict new users from posting outside URL's, for the first X days, Y posts or Z words that'd help to some degree.

What's the General Consensus about this?

I think it is a good idea, one good technique also is on this site
It gives you a picture with a captcha sentence. Then you type it exactly as is, upper and lowercase. I agree we need better spam prevention.

Now if spambot creators find this thread, then they know about another anti-spam to write circumventing code for (This is a bit why for new spam filtering tricks I usually would take this to a private sub-forum or something)

Orrrr we just block anyone filling in the ticalc.org author profile # with a 1, a new user will ignore that and leave it blank, spambots can tell its a number and just put in 1. Every spambot that has gotten through Kerm's filters has had that, every one.

I think the profile field defaults to 1 when you don't put anything there, right? Also it would be nice to make sure people can't type more than 5 characters there, because some of them seem to enter the entire URL, giving an URL such as http://www.ticalc.org/archives/files/authors/http://www.ticalc.org/archives/files/authors/123/1234.html

DJ_O, I think they're going to stumble upon the addition soon enough. The only thing that'd really stop them from posting spam is the outside URL detection. Registration can only be stopped from automatic registrations, not humans wanting to post spam, but the more measures the better.

TheStorm brings up a great suggestion, one that's been suggested repeatedly for a while. I can't find any indication that it does default to 1, as some users don't have it and other (posting/real) users do.

Yes I have been suggesting it for a while! And we've had enough new real users join for me to be pretty a sure it doesn't just default to 1.

That would seem to make sense, at least for right now. I can say with certainty that ‘1’ does not and will never correspond to a valid ticalc.org author ID, anyway.

If you decide to make a TICalc profile of 1 automatically delete the account, you should have a message so real users don't get confused if they put a 1 (But, I don't think that should happen very often, so maybe not). Either way, this sounds like it should remove lots of spam

Agreed. RarityTime & eyeonus are both examples of new users who are active and have "1" as their ticalc.org profile. Just recently, odogollie posted in "Introduce Yourself" and his ticalc profile is 1 too.

It's hard to say if it's user error or if it's defaulting to 1 under the amount of spam registrations we get. We can always ask a member if they set it or register a new account without it set, and see if it sets. :/