Forum is dead

doctorSpoc

the registration for the forum needs to be changed so that it has one of those pictures with the irregular numbers and letters that need to be entered in order to register... this means that the spam bots will not be able to register for the forum in the 1st place. this is why other forums have this step in their registration... in order to elimiate or spam bots being able to register.

Squint

I believe it has something to do with bots. I'm not sure exactly why bots would use the search feature but several other forums I frequent require you do to the character recognition thing for each search performed.

Squint

I believe that's already in place but the bots can defeat those measures.

doctorSpoc

yeah, i see you are right... maybe they are actually registering manually and then sending out the spam with a bot?

Squint

It's certainly possible but spamming is such a low yield activity that they certainly can't do it for the hundreds or thousands of forums they may be spamming. If you've read my earlier postings on this subject, there appear to be bots that can defeat just about all of the character recognition schemes. Since those character recognition tests seem to be getting more and more difficult, I'm assuming bots have been getting better and better at recognizing characters. It's relatively easy to recognized letters and numbers since there are only 36 of them (62 if you count upper and lower case) and they're designed to look different from one another.

Recognizing things is something much harder to program. That's why the tests that use a matrix of images are much harder for bots to defeat. How would you program a bot to distinguish between a picture of a cat and a picture of a squirrel?