New Rules for New users

[dhaupert]

Hi all,

In the last 2 days we've had three spambots guess their captchas and successfully create spam on the forums. You may have seen them if you are set to receive emails for new postings to various topics. I know I did, and I had to rethink how best to fight them.

I just enabled a setting to require us to moderate the first two posts for a new user. In other words, when you sign up and submit a post, it won't immediately go live before we check it. Once we do and approve it, it will show up for all to see. I'll do my best to stay on these so hopefully they won't be delayed by too long. Once you get through two of these, you should see your posts go live immediately. While this is more work for us, it should help with the spam. Someone who wants to spam us will now have to pose as a legit customer and post two valid HanDBase related posts before doing so!

Hope this does not inconvenience anyone besides myself too much

[dhaupert]

As the forum has grown in popularity, so have the attempts to spam it. I was originally deleting maybe 1-2 messages a day that were spam from the moderation portion of the site. In most cases, you were never seeing these spam, but there was one bug in our RSS module that made it possible to see all the spam and junk in RSS feeds. Apologized for those of you subjected to that before we caught and found the fix from the module creator.

Over the last few weeks the amount of attempts to spam us has increased and I think the captcha system we had in place was far too easy for the spambots to hack. It's taking me longer and longer each day to delete messages and ban users, so I've just now upped the requirement on the captcha system, hoping it will make it harder for them.

My apologies in advance to aspiring new legit users of this forum, as I am with most of you who can't believe how hard it is to read some captchas out there. I now understand why they make them so difficult! If this does not work out, I have some other options we can consider. Hoping for the simplest solution first so I can concentrate on other things like improving the HanDBase software!

Thanks for your ears.