Spammers......

[jv]

Just looked at the 'awaiting activation' list and there were about 30 just today that were clearly junk.

Lets see how it goes in the next day...

[Len]

Thats all I do on the RTTS forum John, delete un activated accounts!

[Jay]

Unfortunately adding questions, captcha's, images or combination of questions and images like the one you showed Adam will only be circumvented by spammers who use bots that request human interaction if they can't get past the the signup page, that's assuming the signup is done via bots and not by an Chinese spammers who have 100's or 1000's of people signing up to forums, once signup is confimed the system adds it to the spam list and the bot then logs in and does it's thing.

For every step taken by admins to try stop spammers, there will be a way to get around it and the 'hardcore' spammers have already automated systems dedicated to get around these antispam measures, some of which I've listed above.

The only real way would be to use AI in the forum software watching every post looking for tell-tales signs of spam and blocking it before it's written to the DB

[Adam]

Jay, your giving me ideas for my dissertation

[Jay]

Glad to help Here is some more... spammers are like Malware authors, they always find a new way to do what they do and deliver it as quickly and efficiently as possible - time is money after all - and any new spam prevention tech that becomes popular enough will get circumvented as they update their automation systems and processes. The only way to control it is to be draconian, which puts users off - enter ED38.

[Len]

I knew there was a reason I have never joined Ed38!