Thread: Captcha.

A good suggestion, deserving of a good answer.

The "captcha" is in place to stop the "bots" from registering, and it has been an effective tool. Our sister forum, MIMF, has gone one step further in that spam postings are immediately put into moderation queue (invisible to all members except the forum staff). If we removed the captcha I think you would see about 20 times more spam. Compared to legitimate postings, spam postings that make it to the boards make up less than one-half of one percent of all posts within the forum.

Requiring approval of a new registration is not all bad, nor is it all good. There are many new registrations who never post ... and that is certainly okay by us. A potential spammer (and we do not know if one who is not blacklisted is or is not a spammer) will register and not post months or <sigh> years.

Not every new spammer is blacklisted yet ... Some are brand new, and none of us have any clue - until they post. Moderating and approving new registrations will not have much affect in reducing spam, at least in our viewpoint. We (the staff) deal with it ... and deal with it rather swiftly ... spammers are immediately banned and their ban is permanent. We have resorted to blocking certain IP address at times, too.

I have, in some cases, banned a known spammer before they even have a change to confirm their membership ... so, we are fairly constantly checking those whose registration is pending (pending their clicking on the confirmation link in an email sent to them).

There were a total of 2,466 new registrations in 2009 ... about one fourth of those post regularly ... so that means that the forum staff would have to check (DAILY) 1,849 members to see if they have logged in or posted. I don't have that kind of spare time, and neither does anyone else here.

January 2010 has, so far, 308 new registrations

To add to the above:

Please, please, please ... do NOT respond or reply directly to any spam post. EVER!! Just report it, and leave it alone.

Replying directly to a spam posting sends the clear message to the spammer(s) that messages like this HAVE been read, and then the spam proliferates here.

With the additional staff we are able to eradicate this junk usually within a couple hours .

Originally Posted by Krumhorn

If we removed the captcha I think you would see about 20 times more spam. Compared to legitimate postings, spam postings that make it to the boards make up less than one-half of one percent of all posts within the forum.

By the way, my compliments to this board for keeping it spam-free as it is. I was coming from another big classical web forum with the same vBulletin software before I found this one which is full of spammers now and seems to be given up by the admins.

Human registers ... bot takes over ... fact of life for the admins
Still, spam accounts for less than one-half of 1% of the total postings here

Once reported to us, as was done here, the spammer is banned and their posts removed in a pretty decent amount of time.