Important Trouble brewing on the server.

that latest member looks like a spammer

Indeed, there's been a few of those the last couple of months. Mostly, they only spam us moderators...

I'll be moving the site, the databases and the mud ports to a new server the next couple of days. I'll do my best to avoid any data loss in the process. I'll let you know when the move is complete via this thread.

In the process of moving, I'll make sure I update every file joomla uses - our captcha might be too easily broken atm...

BTW: The new server is kindly provided by Kewlb!

Yeah, I've seen a lot of account names that were clearly spambots. Seen very few of them actually post though which is a good sign.

I was moderating about 6 spam posters a day until I added the R Antispam module. Captcha was useless. Maybe the move with updates will make things better. I've just accepted the fact they can't be stopped. But you would think it could be handled better than it is.

Rumble wrote: I was moderating about 6 spam posters a day until I added the R Antispam module. Captcha was useless. Maybe the move with updates will make things better. I've just accepted the fact they can't be stopped. But you would think it could be handled better than it is.

I think they can be stopped.

I was an admin on www.tribalwars.co.uk for a decent while and the forums there absolutely never had spambots, they however used vBulletin forums which is unfortunately one of the few forums setups that isn't free to use. That vBulletin has managed to be spambot free though surely means it's possible to achieve the same with other forum configurations as well.

Spam Bots are the bane of forum admins everywhere. It's unfortunate, but often unavoidable without manually approving registrations.

I have run vBulliten in the past and I was quite strict with "question" based challenge instead of captcha challenge. Most of the captcha choices for vb were compromised.

The best thing to do is just identify, delete the user and then ban that IP address. Most of the time that IP address is just some other compromised entity though.

Kewlb wrote: Spam Bots are the bane of forum admins everywhere. It's unfortunate, but often unavoidable without manually approving registrations.

I have run vBulliten in the past and I was quite strict with "question" based challenge instead of captcha challenge. Most of the captcha choices for vb were compromised.

The best thing to do is just identify, delete the user and then ban that IP address. Most of the time that IP address is just some other compromised entity though.

Hmm, maybe vBulletin itself wasn't more spambot resistant then. The more likely reason TW got no spambots I suppose is that to make a forum account you had to use the same name as your ingame account and enter the password of your ingame account when creating the forum account.