Spammers

[findinglisp]

Just had a spammer come through and post a bunch of crap. If anybody notices anything that looks fishy, you can always report it quickly by hitting the exclamation point icon up by the "Quote" button in the post itself. I'll get a notification and then I can take whatever action is appropriate. I have zero tolerance for spam. If you ever want to post something that you think might cross the line, shoot me a message and we can talk about it. Posting a link to your eBay listing where you are selling your old Symbolics machine would not be spam, IMO, but I guess spam is in the eye of the beholder.

[Exolon]

Looks like spammers (like this one) are hitting the board - there's probably a captcha in the registration page; I can't remember... but it's probably still worthwhile for a human spammer to fill in a captcha once, then unleash a bot with the new account.
How about adding a captcha when submitting a post, for the first (say) 10 posts a user makes? That might make the job of running a spambot annoying enough to stop spammers.

[findinglisp]

Deleted. I'll see what I can't come up with. The registration already requires a valid email address, etc. I'm trying not to require a captcha on every post. IMO, that's too punitive. Let me see if I can't ratchet it up a notch, though.

[Exolon]

Another bot

[Exolon]

Hmm, two separate spambots posting to the same thread

[findinglisp]

Yea, I try to whack these guys every couple days. Sorry about the lag. Sometime I'm caught up with other things and don't get a chance to do it. I have turned on the more aggressive forum registration options to try to mitigate it, but a few are still getting through.

[gugamilare]

Don't think captcha is effective enough. comp.lang.lisp uses captcha for every single post, but there is still a lot of spam there. But there there is no moderator as well, so there is the problem. I think many spammers have bots that can fill a captcha.

[nuntius]

Don't think captcha is effective enough. comp.lang.lisp uses captcha for every single post, but there is still a lot of spam there. But there there is no moderator as well, so there is the problem. I think many spammers have bots that can fill a captcha.

I don't know how you access cll (google?), but nntp access does not use captchas.

On a related note, I would be willing to participate as a 2nd-tier mod: somebody who could hide flagged comments until findinglisp had time to unhide/delete them. Better yet, I've seen some other forums autohide comments when a certain threshold is met; the text of such comments is replaced by something like "this comment has been flagged for admin review".

[gugamilare]

I don't know how you access cll (google?), but nntp access does not use captchas.

Yes, I use google, that's explained now.

On a related note, I would be willing to participate as a 2nd-tier mod: somebody who could hide flagged comments until findinglisp had time to unhide/delete them. Better yet, I've seen some other forums autohide comments when a certain threshold is met; the text of such comments is replaced by something like "this comment has been flagged for admin review".

This is a good idea.

[Paul Donnelly]

I don't have much experience filtering spam from forums, but I've found it pretty easy to filter spam in my news reader just by checking for keywords (such as handbags, wristwatches, and the like). In this case, "wow gold" seems like it would catch all the spam so far. Would keyword filtering be possible in this case?