Spam bots

[Link Von Kelsier Harvey he/him]

You seem to have at least one spam bot creating new threads with bizarre names and no content.  Nothing too problematic, but one of them mentioned Viagra, so it can only go downhill from there.  The one I noticed is CemiCrits.

[mycoltbug]

I mentioned it to Rainbowrose the other day. I'll tweet the admins now.

[Shivertongue he/him]

We're aware of the spambots, and we're working on it. Our spam filter does not appear to be doing it's job..

[Eerongal he/him]

Yeah, it happens. Pretty much nothing you can do about it. No matter how good your spam filters are, or how up to date things are, the occasional spam bot will get through. As the technology behind the bots gets better, so too does the tech behind the forum software. It's pretty much always an on-going battle.

[Link Von Kelsier Harvey he/him]

Perhaps you guys have noticed, perhaps not.  But there have been a recent string of people introducing themselves in the "General Theories" part of the forums.  Kchan dutifully moves them to the "introduce yourself" section and then replies.  I've noticed, however, that all of them 1)follow the username format: First name, middle initial, last name 2) post things completely unrelated to BWS 3) all still only have a post count of one.  They don't seem like Spambots per se (there's no links or weird advertisements) but I don't think they're people!

[Ryan he/him]

A captcha might help. I'll see about installing recaptcha. We might also want to turn on email verification, which I don't want to do since I really hate it, but it may turn out to be a necessary evil.

...and done. We now have a recaptcha on the registration form, and it works. We'll see if that curtails anything.

[Munin he/him]

Perhaps you guys have noticed, perhaps not.  But there have been a recent string of people introducing themselves in the "General Theories" part of the forums.  Kchan dutifully moves them to the "introduce yourself" section and then replies.  I've noticed, however, that all of them 1)follow the username format: First name, middle initial, last name 2) post things completely unrelated to BWS 3) all still only have a post count of one.  They don't seem like Spambots per se (there's no links or weird advertisements) but I don't think they're people!

Also, they filled in the website section of their profiles with their introduction threads. I mean, who does that?

[KChan she/her]

Not sure, but the recaptcha seems to be working so far. I checked this morning, and there were no new spam threads that I could find.