shoes888 must DIE!

immediately

you know, I was just looking at my worn shoes and wondering what fall jacket I will be wearing and also wondering where to go.........huh.

I always think the moderator's must go to lunch and come back and have all this that happened in one short 60 minute period and just SCREAM!

agreed.

GRM, please give one of the esteemed regular members power to ZAP spam bots.

• The Readers

Man, looks what happened in like the blink of an eye....arrrrgggggh shoes88888888888

We need to send Pseudosport's Canoe Guy after them!!!

Shoes is dead.

z31maniac wrote: GRM, please give one of the esteemed regular members power to ZAP spam bots. - The Readers

Not going to happen in the immediate future. Spambots typically get killed within a few hours, (usually less) and handing over the keys to a non-employee is a bad idea on a few levels.

Tom Heath wrote: Shoes is dead.

Is it possible to place the corpse on a wheel or spike or something as a sign to other spambots?

In reply to Giant Purple Snorklewacker:

While the thought of canoes and various site issues keep me up at night, when I do get to sleep I dream of exactly that.

SilverFleet wrote: We need to send Pseudosport's Canoe Guy after them!!!

So when are these shirts coming out, i'd like to buy one

The irony-

While this attack was happening, I was in a phone meeting with our web design peeps talking about the next revision to the site. Specifically, the best way to fight the spammers. Some combination of captchas and questions that require human intelligence upon new user registration will be implemented.

z31maniac wrote: GRM, please give one of the esteemed regular members power to ZAP spam bots. - The Readers

The day that a non-employee becomes a moderator, I'll probably stop visiting this site.

Can I offer a suggestion? Make the registration form have a picture of a Miata with a question of "What car is this?". If they can't answer we don't want them anyways.

At a forum I help administer, all new users' first posts go to a moderation queue for approval, and they cannot make a new thread until their first post approved by the moderation staff. Helps weed out the idiot trolls as well as the spammers.

Another nice tool is being able to "Delete post as spam" which automatically deletes all posts by the user in question and bans him in 1 easy click.

Or, a picture of a random Harbor Freight tool.

If the answer is anything but "hammer", they are not allowed.

Javelin wrote: Can I offer a suggestion? Make the registration form have a picture of a Miata with a question of "What car is this?". If they can't answer we don't want them anyways.

You're very close to the answer we're looking at, though it might cycle between a few options to prevent them from writing a script.

Duke wrote: At a forum I help administer, all new users' first posts go to a moderation queue for approval, and they cannot make a new thread until their first post approved by the moderation staff. Helps weed out the idiot trolls as well as the spammers. Another nice tool is being able to "Delete post as spam" which automatically deletes all posts by the user in question and bans him in 1 easy click.

Both good ideas. The first is unlikely due to the board software, and the second would save me HOURS of time every week.

We do the 2nd on the forum I own too. But we also run userid's for admin approval via IP. If it's an obvious one IE buy \/1agra cheap or something, gone. if the IP comes up outside the US, gone (we're an MN based board, not russian.) worked well so far, we haven't had one get past the front line in almost 3 years.

@mndsm- How large is your user base?

I can't eliminate foreign IPs as a rule, as we have significant international traffic. We also get a significant number of new users registering every day, and since there's exactly 1 person keeping an eye on them I'm not sure it would save much time in the end.

mtn wrote:

z31maniac wrote: GRM, please give one of the esteemed regular members power to ZAP spam bots. - The Readers

The day that a non-employee becomes a moderator, I'll probably stop visiting this site.

Keep in mind, I'm wasn't suggesting myself.

Javelin wrote: Can I offer a suggestion? Make the registration form have a picture of a Miata with a question of "What car is this?". If they can't answer we don't want them anyways.

The biggest problem is we may have some people over-think this and try to say it's a 1995 M edition with Kosei K1s...

Tom Heath wrote:

Javelin wrote: Can I offer a suggestion? Make the registration form have a picture of a Miata with a question of "What car is this?". If they can't answer we don't want them anyways.

You're very close to the answer we're looking at, though it might cycle between a few options to prevent them from writing a script.

I'd like to point out I'm not an expert on obscure Italian cars.

mndsm wrote: We do the 2nd on the forum I own too. But we also run userid's for admin approval via IP. If it's an obvious one IE buy \/1agra cheap or something, gone. if the IP comes up outside the US, gone (we're an MN based board, not russian.) worked well so far, we haven't had one get past the front line in almost 3 years.

One issue with IP-based blocking is that one bad egg can affect a whole lot of legit users if they're using the same provider. There's at least one large ISP with initials similar to Alabama Off Line that used to route all their traffic via a handful of externally visible proxies. They might have changed that recently but I somehow doubt that.

Tom Heath wrote: @mndsm- How large is your user base? I can't eliminate foreign IPs as a rule, as we have significant international traffic. We also get a significant number of new users registering every day, and since there's exactly 1 person keeping an eye on them I'm not sure it would save much time in the end.

Couple hundred actives, maybe 500 total verified users. We're small.