Okay folks...sorry to have to do this, but because of excessive amounts of spam, I have disabled guest posting...if you want to post, you'll need to register for a membership. If we continue to have problems like we have for the last few weeks, measures will get slightly more draconian. Let's see how this works for starters. From now on, new registrations will have a random password emailed to them to ensure that the account is attached to a valid email address, and only then will they be able to log in/post.

Also, a big thanks to the folks who've been letting me know when they see spam, it's a great help.

Thanks, I'm glad you did! Those spam posts were very annoying!

Cheers,
Henrik

Three cheers for the Webmistress!  Hip, hip, huzzah!  Hip, hip, huzzah!  Hip, hip, huzzah!

Well, let's hold off on the huzzahs until we see if it works, m'kay?  ;)

does YaBB have visual confirmation like PhpBB?
that stops a lot of spambots too!

Edited to add...oops, sorry, accidentally edited your post because I had several things going at once. Reply to this is below. Sorry!   -Da Webmaster

At least you will be able to know which members are spamming, if any, and revoke their membership, right?

I was going to join in on the three cheers, but since this has been called off, I'll just have to "Tak' my wee bonnet aff fer the gude webmistress" instead :D

Cheers,
Henrik

Ach, now, go on with ya', she's just being a humble lass.  Give 'er the cheers she deserves!

wrote on 10/06/06 at 09:29:11:

does YaBB have visual confirmation like PhpBB? that stops a lot of spambots too!

Not in this version, and I'm holding off on major upgrades or migrations until I finish up some other stuff. My experience with third-party visual confirmation providers has been moderately negative, so I'd as soon not go that route, either. We'll see how this does. I've already had several registrations with bogus email addresses attached, just since yesterday.

Yep, I can ban bogus users. I can (and sometimes do) ban IP's and emails and usernames all day long, but it won't do much good. I'm also banning some entire ranges of IP's, and as soon as I have enough of a list, I'll do reverse lookup and send emails to abuse addresses (not that it'll do any good, ISP's aren't as willing to yank accounts as they used to be). But dialup accounts change IP every time you dial in, so keeping up with that list can be exhausting after a while.

Grin and bear it, guys...it could be a lot worse.

always keep yer forum software up to date... this keeps away some spammers, further the visual confirmation can only be done by actual persons, a spambot can't read the v.c. so he can't spam.
I went from 10 spambots a day to none.
Now only actual persons that are spamming once in a few days instead of a few every day.

with the newest versions of PHPBB the version nr. isn't being displayed anymore, a thing many spambots are looking for.
I dunno if YaBB does that too.

Greenthings Wim-Jaap