There be SPAMbots here!

[Michael McNamara]

I'm truly amazed at the number of SPAMbots that attempt to register an account on this forum. There are around 380 members currently registered with 286 of them having yet to activate their account. That's ~ 75% of all registrations that are being created by SPAMbots. I deleted about 240 of them tonight, cleaning up the database. You'd be surprise the hack attempts that are always running against this forum and my personal blog.

Jeff over at TheTelecomBlog recently setup a discussion forum of his own and was almost immediately inundated with SPAM posts all over his forum. He hadn't configured SMF to require email activation.

I believe the current SPAM rate in our corporate email system is around 80%, which is totally amazing.

The Internet is a very cool place and a very dangerous place all at the same time.

[Michael McNamara]

I deleted another 100+ accounts today that were created by SPAM bots...

While I like the idea that we have 500+ forum members the truth is that we have just around 123 active members with really 50 contributing members.

I think I'll look into the possibility of deploying reCAPTCHA during the new user registration process.

[Michael McNamara]

That was pretty quick and relatively easy...

I've setup reCAPTCHA for any new user registrations as opposed to the built-in CAPTCHA solution that comes with the Simple Machines Forum software.

Thanks to Motoko-chan for his SMF mod reCAPTCHA for SMF.

Let's see if that stems the flow any.

[Michael McNamara]

It' been two days now since I installed reCAPTCHA and we've add two new members and we have 0 members awaiting activation. I suspect we may have won this battle but the war still rages!

[Michael McNamara]

It's almost been a week now and the SPAMbots are completely stymied.

There hasn't been a single fraudulent account registered since I installed reCAPTCHA.