Over the last 2 years, the amount of SPAM attacks via the internet has increased alarmingly. More recently and specifically since October 2008, the degree of forum-targeted spam abuse has shot through the roof.
Traditionally image verification has kept most automated spam scripts from registering and being able to post on forums. Once the spammers found a way to defeat those systems, more advanced image verification was developed utilising scanned words from real text books, which automatic spam-scripts CANNOT read. This system is known as
Recaptcha verification and has been utilised within the Saxperience community for a number of months.
More recently, spammers have been employing people in far-flung countries to manually read and de-code recaptcha codes and sell these on the spam-market. This has meant that automatic-script proof verification systems are becoming increasingly less useful!!
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post...l-hotmail.html
Entire communities/services are now being setup to help to fight forum spam.
http://www.stopforumspam.com/ What is this world coming to!?!
So, in the fight against spam-bots, today a series of questions & answer verifications has been implemented for the Saxperience community. I am aware this will be a little more troublesome for members to register, however if it helps to reduce the number of auto-register spam accounts, then its a step that must be taken.
This system is not fool proof... many spam-scripts request human assistance when errors are encountered, but Im confident this will significantly reduce the amount of spam registrations... atleast for the next few months... then the Spam-attackers will evolve, meaning more advanced spam prevention measures need to be dreamt up.
If anyone has any comments or suggestions for improvement, please let me know.
Simo
SPAM-Bot control
lol
Linear Mode
