Hi all, our beloved forum has been hit hard by spammers over the past few days. I’m just making some adjustments to try and hinder them. So what I’m doing now is allowing new users to join at present but requiring all first posts from new users (trust level 0) to require admin or moderator approval. This way we can legitimise new users. The only issue here is those of you who are still on trust level zero (new user) and have never posted will require that your first post need to be approved. Sorry for the inconvenience it’s only temporary whilst we try and find a way to prevent spammers targeting our forum. Thank you Davide
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one way to reduce the mischief but still let people post - allow a single new thread and the user can only respond into those threads for say 5 days. this lets people with questions get answers, extend the conversation if needed and they’re sandboxed. if it turns out to be spam, then it’s only a single thread to be removed.
to truly be effective though, you need better authentication steps including sending an email to which they must respond (validating it’s at least a real email address) and spend 5 minutes after that populating the user information page - doesn’t have to be personal but some validation to make sure the entries aren’t garbage will ensure actual people, along with the usualy captcha etc on save.
this approach enables the conversations to happen, and has a cost to spammers in terms of time before that can launch a large scale attack.
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E-mail authentication would be a great idea if possible.
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Just a quick update here, spam bots seem to have relented for now. I have removed most restrictions only leaving the first post requires approval. Given there’s a few moderators about covering all time zones, genuine posters will have their first post approved quickly.
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and, considering the kind of “text” made, they seem more stupid than ever 
seems like some old-timers’ statuses might have gotten reset in the process. No biggie, but it was amusing to be greeted this morning, "welcome, you are a regular now!, LOL, after just 4 years 
Strangely a regular is the silver of trust levels - I upgraded you to it!
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I do wanna know how I get this…
…so I don’t have to hang out with the common riff-raff 
