Spam?

[chewygold]

Hi!

I am so glad I found your forum!.. I hope to visit often as I recently been trained and started using the TOM module of MrStudio after almost 20 years of Quantum and 10 years of Quancept/QCWeb and SPSS

One thing I notice is the huge amount of Spam on your message boards - some of them are pretty graphic. Is there a way to filter these out?

Thanks!

Chewy

[admin]

Chewy,

First welcome to the Dimensions and welcome to the forum.

Recently we have started having a problem with bots make a large number of inappropriate posts. A few weeks ago we started an effort to remove these users and posts with the hope it was a short lived problem. The sad news is the bots seems to be encourage by our attempts to get rid of them. I've made a few changes today that I hope will help the situation:

1. Temporarily I have disable the code that allows posters to insert images, tables, etc. I will keep this in place all the adult related images have been removed from the forum.
2. I have started adding username and email address to the banned list. For the most part they look random, so this may not help a lot.
3. I have added a confirmation email to new user registration. I'm not 100% sure that the boards email system is functioning. We'll look and work on that over the next few days.

These changes may cause you or other user’s small issue but should be an overall improvement.

[Mircea77]

I was acutally thinking few days ago about ways to eliminate this and I had this idea. What if after the activation code or email is being sent they will also need to provide their postal address to be verified and have access to the full functionality of the forum. So, for having access to the full functionality of the forum they will need to provide their postal address (some Terms and Conditions will need to be in drafted and actioned) where you will send another "address verified code" that will need to be entered at a later date. This will put off alot of "forum highjackers" as well as an increase of the trust between forum members. Please let me know what you guys think.

[Raz Khan]

Could you integrate a "captcha" entry, where you have to type in the a word shown in a distorted image that bots can't recognise (at present ?