Spammers

[Chakara]

  Some of you may have noticed a bit of nasty spam showing up on the forums.  People apparently creating accounts just to put up spam - about 20 of them from 2 IP address blocks.  The board was not compromised in any way as far as I can tell, but I can't speak to what might have happened if you followed any of the links there were here.

  Anyway, I have deleted the offending users and any other users coming from the same IP blocks - as well as blocking those addresses with /24 on the end.  I don't think this will affect anyone who is using the site legitimately, but if you are affected then send me a message (from a different network of course) and I'll get you squared away.

  Sorry for the inconvenience . . .

-Chak

[ralph]

Hey Chak,
One of the forums I run gets a few of these a week.  Each time I'll block the IP but more pop up.   Usually I'll just block the entire subnet since it seems most of these come from outside the US.
You may want to give some other moderator rights to be able to delete these as they pop up.

Ralph

[chadmaynard]

Blocking IP addresses and especially IP ranges is probably not a good option. Large spam operations employ botnets which are composed of computers all over, not to mention IP spoofing. Captchas might be an alternative option, or "How much is <integer less than 10> + <integer less than 10>?" or e-mail activation, etc. If the forum grows to any reasonable size IP blacklists just become a nightmare.

[ralph]

I'm still blocking IP's.   Most of what I get is from outside the US. 
Haven't figured out how to turn on captcha yet.

Ralph.

[chadmaynard]

That's probably reasonable if you are only getting one or two a week.. but it gets harder if you get a few hundred a day.