Spammers are on the increase..

[Kerbob]

EricJ320 and I have been deleting the spammer accounts as soon as they join.  We've been able to hold them at bay, but its an increasing trend.  What happens is that bad guys have programs that search for forums on the internet like ours and automatically create fictitious accounts on them and then post spam of some sort. 
To stop them, forum administrators came up with the concept of a CAPTCHA test (Completely Automated Process for Telling Computers and Humans Apart) during membership enrollment which is an image people can read but these programs can't.  Well, the programs are getting better at getting past the CAPTCHA's using Optical Character Recognition technology (OCR) so we're seeing more spammer activity. I may be updating our forum to use the newer 'reCaptcha' system to thwart them. The reCaptcha system is a next generation of CATPCHA's.  You can take it for a test ride here:
http://www.google.com/recaptcha/learnmore

If you're already a member, you won't have to do the CAPTCHA thing again.  It is only something that is presented during the enrollment process. The down side of the reCAPTCHA is that sometimes I can't even read what it says making new member enrollment a potential challenge.

Security Tip
For your own security, I recommend not posting your email address or phone number in any of your posts. The Bad Guys have programs that scan forums for email addresses that can put you on spam lists and they're getting smarter at putting obfuscated email addresses together.  In other words, they can figure out that "bob at gmail dot com" in your post is bob@gmail.com.  Posting your phone numbers may give away your confidentiality if you wish to maintain it.  The use of reverse phone number lookups on Google or other engines makes it fairly easy for someone to get your name and address from just your phone number. 
Instead, use personal messages. You can send any other member a personal message by clicking the personal message icon under their name. Personal Messages are private and are a great way to share your email or phone number, make an offer for something on sale, or just send a private message to any other member on the forum.

[EricJ320]

Some have gone so far as to post info in their posts that copy previous information from the thread, or use keywords from either the thread title, or that's been previously posted in the thread.  Many of you may have seen this from a recent poster that I deleted that made several posts in threads that made no sense, but used words that made it seem like at least the person was talking about the thread topic.  I don't know if this is computer generated or not, but I see it more and more often.  A dead giveaway is they usually have some sort of link in their tag at the bottom of their posts.  After an IP search of a couple of them it appears they mostly originate out of India.  I delete them as soon as I see them, as I'm sure Kerbob does, but it doesn't hurt to report the post so that we get emails about them and know to go address it.   Sometimes it can be once a day or so that I get the forum, but I get email pushed to my phone all the time.

[Flying_fox]

Have you seen the key captcha things, there a lot more human friendly, just put together a simple jigsaw puzzle, they are sooo much less irritating


https://www.keycaptcha.com/


 

[Kerbob]

Nice find Flying_fox. I like it better too.  Its now installed instead of the standard captcha and will look like the image below for new users.

[Kerbob]

Unfortunately, the key kaptcha hasn't stopped the spammers. I can only assume they are manually creating the accounts.

[EricJ320]

I pretty clueless how the computer systems work, as far as beating the systems and posting.  But Kerbob, I don't know about you, but I can often tell when we are about to get a spam post just based on new member notifications we get, the names are usually nothing a hobbyist would use.  What's weird is, sometimes they join, then wait several days to post something.  So either that's a real person doing it, or the computers are beating the kaptcha and then coming back after some delay to post their spam.  Seems like lately I've been deleting about 2-3 spam posts and accounts a week.

[Dylonius]

Spammers! DesirePower?

[EricJ320]

Spammers! DesirePower?

I was inclined to let them stay since it is somewhat related to what we do here.  But then I noticed they spammed just about every forum we have with the same post, or at least similar posts.  So, bye bye!

[aston70]

Our VAM, club guestbook used to get spammed a lot and at first I would just delete them, until we got hit from a zombie attack. We had over 20 posts in under a second and IP lookups showed they came from all over the globe although most were from China. I coded in a blocked IP list and added the captchas and that seems to have taken care of it for the most part. It looks like it's started again in the last couple months. Someone may have figured out how to beat the captchas I'm using. May have to try something else. Maybe a random picture with a name that plane list of options. 

[Kerbob]

There are a lot of options for antispam, but I'm not sure what would work the best.  We can go to an 'approval' process which means new members wouldn't be enabled until we 'approved' them. 
There were THREE 'iffy' accounts today.  I was hoping the key kaptcha would work.  I have to think that there are real people behind this instead of some piece of code or script.

[Kerbob]

I bumped up the security on the CAPTCHA again.  As soon as the upgrade was done, we had several bots registering.  I've deleted them.

I can't read the CAPTCHA myself its so convoluted... but a human can click the 'read letters' to get an audio version.

[aston70]

Advanced Textual Confirmation might be a solution?

here's one for phpbb, but I don't know if there is one for smf.
http://bbantispam.com/atc/

On this forum they talk about a custom profile field mod used in conjuction with captchas?
http://www.simplemachines.org/community/index.php?topic=153491.0

[Kerbob]

I have the ability to ask some contextual questions without a plugin.  Maybe I'll give it a whirl right now.

The change has been made.  I had to disable the puzzle captcha, but that wasn't working too hot anyway.  Let's see what happens now.