A Guide to Combating Spam on a Simple Machines Forum

Started by Account Abandoned, September 17, 2011, 04:23:20 AM

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Kindred

verification image... aka captcha - is useless.


we have a much better FAQ here... http://wiki.simplemachines.org/smf/Spam_-_my_forum_is_flooded_with_spam,_what_can_I_do
(which was already linked to, above)
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"Loki is not evil, although he is certainly not a force for good. Loki is... complicated."

Gwenwyfar

Reading through some of the topic here, would leaving questions only but not captcha be more efficient than just the captcha or efficient enough to leave the captcha out then?

I personally dislike when there are those annoying hard to read captchas on registration, etc, so I've left them simple because I'm sure I'm not the only one, and I don't want anyone to be scared off by the registration form, but then that wouldn't be of much use after all?

The forum has a bonus that it is not english, so could add any simple questions that anyone can get right and not be an annoyance, and still be too hard for a bot.

"It is impossible to communicate with one that does not wish to communicate"

Kindred

yes...   I no longer use captcha on any of my other forums
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Please do not PM, IM or Email me with support questions.  You will get better and faster responses in the support boards.  Thank you.

"Loki is not evil, although he is certainly not a force for good. Loki is... complicated."

Gwenwyfar

#63
Then I wonder why the smf site uses it? Way too many spambot attempts?

(And yeah, sorry about the "obvious" question, don't wanna confirm this one the hard way, I'm trying to "rebuild" the forum and not just move it, so that sort of things could cause quite some damage :P, also seems odd that most people use captchas and not questions)
"It is impossible to communicate with one that does not wish to communicate"

Kindred

because we have no other option in 2.0.

I swear, this has been discussed at least 4 or 5 times.
We know that captcha is almost useless. However, almost is not the same as completely...   and if we prevent a few spammers by using captcha, then we'll take it.

We can't use questions here because this is a multi-lingual site... and multi-lingual questions are not a feature until 2.1
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Please do not PM, IM or Email me with support questions.  You will get better and faster responses in the support boards.  Thank you.

"Loki is not evil, although he is certainly not a force for good. Loki is... complicated."

Gwenwyfar

#65
Ahh. I see.

Sorry, I usually prefer to read first and ask later but I have not really been having all that much spare time to do that. Specially when there's so much discussion around it, would take a while to read everything, didn't come across any message related to this on the parts I read :P

Was thinking those image-recognition captchas seem to be better as well, but it would probably be unnecessary effort to implement this if the questions are good enough (probably even better);
"It is impossible to communicate with one that does not wish to communicate"

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