Too many spammers

Is there no chance of changing the board software so as to make everyone's first post(s) go only to a moderator, and require them to be marked "OK" before they are clear to post to the rest of the Forum?

The Yahoo groups have such a thing - the (much neglected) Lex Hermeticum group has that rule.

It just seems that nearly every new user who makes 1-3 posts is joining solely to have an account to post spam. The number of genuine newcomers is quite small...

[Captcha has been and had its day - spammers pay a pittance to 3rd-world humans to read and answer captcha questions.]

Good point ... I'll ask our webmaster. I just banned something like 30 IPs over the weekend, following up on everybody's reports on spammers. :frowning:

Gaah they invented a spambot with a sense of irony, abandon Message Board! flees in panic

today, the scum using the name "shoes888" posted 55 messages, all spam...

Yup, this is very frustrating.

I've had one recent volunteer to be a Spaminator. Any others out there?

I just set the limit on the number of links in sigs to 3. If it keeps being a problem, I may disable links in sigs altogether, though I hate to do that since quite a few legitimate users have legitimate links in their sigs.

I'd like to help. I am on this board like almost every day Monday through Friday.

We're up to 6 Spaminators now, which I think is plenty ... I'll post again if we need more later on. Our thanks to our new volunteers! :slight_smile:

After much research, I think we've figured out how to require moderation of the first post of new users. Please let me know if you encounter any trouble with it.