Spambot attacks

[Sesselmann]

Hi all,

Yesterday we came under attack from some spambots, almost certainly originating in Russia, as the email registrations were .ru and they were promoting Russian porn sites. I have now deleted all the fake user accounts and made some adjustments to the Q&A on the registration page, hope that stops it.

We could possibly do with another one or two moderators here to help keep the forum clean.

Steven

[Sesselmann]

Haha... it appears my new anti spambot Q&A's are working..

What does Duck and Trump have in common?

What does Freddy Mercury and Elisabeth II have in common?

What do you call a British exit?

Please don't post answers..

Steven

[Sesselmann]

It looks like our Russian spammer friends are now back to at work after Christmas celebrations. The forum is being hammered by spam-registration-bots, fortunately most of their posts with links to porn and gambling sites don't make it onto the board, as we manually approve the first three posts by new registrants.

I suspect they are paying people to crack the anti spambot Q&A and then handing the answers over to bots.

Yesterday I changed the Q&A, but they are probably still too simple if real people are doing it, may have to ask for a solution to the Riemann Zeta Function, that might stop them :)

[Geoff]

I’ve been deleting and banning almost every day. Definitely an uptick in spam.

[Svilen]

I disapproved several too. Maybe you can make a basic nuclear physics Q&A filter. :)

[Sesselmann]

I disapproved several too. Maybe you can make a basic nuclear physics Q&A filter. :)

Thanks Svilen, I suspect they just google the answers, we need basic questions that everyone except Russians can answer and that can't be googled :)

(no offence to any Russian members of the forum, it just happens that recent spam has been posted in Russian)

It probably works just changing the questions whenever the spam starts.

Steven