Uniontown Pennsylvania Message Forums - WWW.UNIONTOWN.COM

Not sure if anyone noticed or not, but we have been averaging about one spammer per day posting crap on our little message forum here.

I tend to delete them pretty quick (I get emails when they post messages), so the casual visitor may not even be aware of them.

It amazes me that someone would go through the trouble of setting up a fake email account and registering here just to post a few spam messages. How could it be worth it?

I do still get dozens of automated attempts of registering here per day, most are from Europe. If I didn't have this registration with the Captcha (the part of the registration where you have to enter the text in the image) this board would be riddled with spam.

Apparently the bots have been able to overcome the Captcha filter in new user registrations, and this explains why all the spam recently:

http://www.phpbb.com/community/viewtopic.php?f=46&t=1437125#p8563395

"Unfortunately, it appears as if automated spambots have become able to crack the 3.0.4 CAPTCHA. 3.0.5 introduces several new changes to the CAPTCHA that will hopefully deter these spammers. Until then, there are numerous things you can do to limit or completely stop your spamming problems."

I have a MOD that I will be installing that should be able to stop the automated bots. Supposedly, just adding one or two different requirement fields to the registration process throws off the automation of the bots, so I am going to have the registration process ask a simple question that a human will be able to answer easily.

I was assuming that these recent spammers were human, but I understand now how it's profitable if it's an automated bot able to log in and post thousands and thousands of spams per day to boards like this one. Let's see if we can stop them.

Haven't had a spammer since the change, prior to that I was getting at least one per day.

I think that resolved the issue for now.

Now is you can just figure out how to stimulate informative mature topics and discussions

I couldn't agree more.

I am both surprised and disappointed that there isn't more participation here.

We get a lot of hits, most are unique, but there are many return visitors, just nobody's posting.

I guess it's not always true that if you build it they will come.

We'll let 'er roll and see what happens.