Invision help - how to limit spammers

[kenstauffer]

Hi, I am Ken Stauffer and I am running an invision board for Evolve 4.0, I am not really interested in doing lots of admin. on it, but it seems that I get tons of spam to the forum and I was wondering if you guys have the same problem? I'm asking for any tips/tricks for eliminating the spam?

Any suggestions?

Thanks,
Ken

Here's a link to the forum: http://evolve4.invisionzone.com

[Jez]

anti spam
Announcement by Nums. If you are really lucky I'll post this on your forum as well shortly, not the best way maybe but has certainly been effective.

[Numsgil]

I just have all users have to wait for an admin to validate them.  It's slow and discouraging.  Usually spammers try to post the second after they register.  If you don't let them, (by making them wait to be validated) that solves most of the problem.

If you ever figure out a better method, please tell me!  Spam is driving me crazy too.

[kenstauffer]

I just have all users have to wait for an admin to validate them.  It's slow and discouraging.  Usually spammers try to post the second after they register.  If you don't let them, (by making them wait to be validated) that solves most of the problem.

If you ever figure out a better method, please tell me!  Spam is driving me crazy too.

I implemented this suggestion. Thanks (and thanks to Jez too).

Does anybody know how the spammers get around the anti-spam image that requires a human to look at an image that contains numbers in order to register? I always thought that that was a fullproof mechanism for ensuring a human was registering. But apparently this doesn't stop automated bots from getting in. How is that possible?

Cheers & Happy New Year

[Jez]

"CAPTCHAs
Perhaps the most famous Turing-style test in use as an anti-spam technique is the CAPTCHA (a cutesy acronym that stands for "Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart")."
Six Apart guide to combatting comment spam

"optical character recognition has been shown to be readily tweakable to decode captchas without human intervention -- that which a computer can generate, a computer can often solve."
Solving CAPTCHAs with free porn

I have read comments about this on a hacker site before, they thought it was laughable that this method was considered hard to beat. If anything, they said, get your program to hit the 'I can't read this image properly' button and it'll probably give you an easier one!

[Numsgil]

Yeah, it's an issue with the CAPTCHAs.  In the end, I think the main weakness with Invision boards is their popularity.  Too many bots out there that can register themselves.

One suggestion I heard but have no idea how to implement would have users that register input an answer to a question like "what city is this board about".  It wouldn't be hard for a spammer to give the answer to his bot, but hopefully it would be just discouraging enough to make them move on to other boards.

Basically, you could ask any question that a human wouldn't have a hard time asking, but a computer would.  No idea how to implement it though.

[Racecarlock]

Simple my fine friend direct the spammers here http://z6.invisionfree.com/World_of_Spam_Forums/index.php

[Testlund]

Maybe we should head over there and force them to participate in an intellectual discussion. That whould be like spamming on that forum.  

[Elite]

How's this for a CAPTCHA?

Essentially, a bunch of pictures of cats and dogs, and you have to got through identifying them as either cats or dogs. Humans can do that easily, but computers completely fail at that kind of pattern-recognition.