I was signing up to post on a video game forum earlier today (god save me), and in addition to the usual alpha numerics with OCR interferance, they also had a small question at the bottom of the page. It was simply "What's 1+1?" with an explaination that this was a genuine question, as it was so far a bot proof device. I hardly think we're at the point where we need to worry about that level of bot registration, but it might be worth considering.
Mal, there's another thing you can do, it's both simple and potentially cock-up prone, and that's changing the name of the entry page register.php to something less obvious. The same page is used for signing up and logging in, and it's the same name on all phpbb-based forums. I've done this on a couple of forums, and it has worked perfectly every time, just make sure that you correct all the occurences of register.php in links and stuff, that's basically the only thing that can go wrong with it...
The thing is they aren't all spam bots, some are crappy SEO marketers paid to get links to people's sites from as many forum as possible - so they'll still sign up no matter what we do, unless we start vetting everyone for approval, so they can't post anything until we say so. It is possible to do that, you can even get people to write a a little paragraph on why they want to join the site, then reject or approve their application to join... It's a bit much to ask though at the moment perhaps. I think we have to keep in mind that making it more difficult to register affects genuine people too. Also, for Katcal, this is a bit more complicated than a PHPBB forum, it doesn't use the same page to register and login, but it might be possible nevertheless. The only problem is it gets more difficult to upgrade the more you bugger about with it.
To be honest, I think the problem is minimal enough at the moment, that it's not worth making life difficult for genuine newbies. Every time we get a spam post, it's dealt with by a moderator usually within an hour, and I think that's good enough.
I'll look into it. I've made it so you can't view the DD threads if you aren't logged in now, so search engines wont be able to index the pages.
Its a bit of a old topic to drag up but we are fine aslong as we don't end up like this forum, which makes people jump through hoops to register. Smartania.com :: View Forum - HOW TO JOIN THE FORUMS, Rules, Guildelines & About Us Read the stickied annoucements. In the past a essay was required when registering.
I find it amusing that a message board that is so worried about spam has a forum called "Links 'n Crap".
