Death to All Spammers
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Yukaphile
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Re: Death to All Spammers
Oh God, has this become a backyard for the Kremlin? I see Russian language everywhere! Like it's friggin' Moscow!
"A culture's teachings - and more importantly, the nature of its people - achieve definition in conflict. They find themselves, or find themselves lacking."
— Kreia, Knights of the Old Republic 2: The Sith Lords
— Kreia, Knights of the Old Republic 2: The Sith Lords
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Yukaphile
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Re: Death to All Spammers
Seriously, why aren't the admins doing something?
"A culture's teachings - and more importantly, the nature of its people - achieve definition in conflict. They find themselves, or find themselves lacking."
— Kreia, Knights of the Old Republic 2: The Sith Lords
— Kreia, Knights of the Old Republic 2: The Sith Lords
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Darth Wedgius
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Re: Death to All Spammers
It's complicated to fix. I don't know that any of them are programmers, and even if one or more are, they have to coordinate among several people, and I don't think any of this is a full-time job for any of them. They're discussing alternatives.
They've been playing whack-a-spammer, but that's people vs. bots. Bots usually win those kinds of contests. And now that this has metastasized into multiple threads in multiple forums, it'll be tougher.
That said, if any admins are reading, I'm volunteering to help. I'm not a PHP developer, but I am a web developer, and I'm generally OK in several open-source databases. I'll be out of touch much of Sunday (donating platelets, which I think counts as higher priority).
Re: Death to All Spammers
Have been scouring the entire open source community for BBS software where comment spam protection isn't an afterthought. Not much luck.
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clearspira
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Yukaphile
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Re: Death to All Spammers
Well, we all know now. So now we know to ignore those threads.
"A culture's teachings - and more importantly, the nature of its people - achieve definition in conflict. They find themselves, or find themselves lacking."
— Kreia, Knights of the Old Republic 2: The Sith Lords
— Kreia, Knights of the Old Republic 2: The Sith Lords
Re: Death to All Spammers
Maybe make it 2 questions. One about SFDebris and one about Linkara, Doctor Who, or Farscape.
It's OK to make mistakes as long as you don't make the same ones. If you do then you're not learning.
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Darth Wedgius
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Re: Death to All Spammers
I don't know much about Linkara's content in the past several years, or about Farscape. I'd have failed 2/3rds of the time. Though some might consider that a positive.
I'm thinking math questions (e.g., "What is 378 minus 412?"), maybe combined with altering the text provided in the questions to make it harder for a screen-scraper to read (like the distorted text in older-style CAPTCHA puzzles -- I've seen some PHP samples for that). If a salt or encryption key can be stored in the session or the database, then a timestamp and the expected answer can be stored, encrypted and Base64-encoded, in a form field. If the correct answer is provided within an hour, you have a user
Re: Death to All Spammers
Put up an essay question and have the mods verify it. New users are slowed, sure, but spammers vanish.
"I know what you’re thinking now. You’re thinking 'Oh my god, that’s treating other people with respect gone mad!'"
When I am writing in this font, I am writing in my moderator voice.
Spam-desu
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Darth Wedgius
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