Thread: Death practice

Requesting the match server for this Wednesday at 8pm.

Spam bots have certainly given their activity a massive spike on the charts recently. Every time I get to come on I think I see about three new threads that are made by spam bots. Infact, I think there are more deleted spam threads on the front page rather then actual threads!

Increased Spamming Attempts and Ways to Combat It

That might well have something to do with it as well. I'll see if I can catch 711 at some point and ask if he's happy to switch to an alternative method for a week or two to see if that eases the problem.

This has been done. We've swapped out ReCaptcha for a question/answer system, so let's see how that effects the spambot numbers - we've literally been dealing with nearly 120 registrations a day for the past week (I've been checking), so hopefully this will give us a chance to thin out the numbers of those that got in before we changed things.

I have also gone through and hard-deleted (physically removed from the database) the vast majority of the spam threads that have been posted over the past several months, in order to unclutter the forum display pages. While doing so, I also made another ban sweep, to ensure that known spam bots have not only had their threads deleted, but also been banned from the forum.

Finally, I have been building a master list of spambot IP addresses across the various forums and sites that I run, I will then update the banned IP list here on L4DF. Hopefully this will help a bit in preventing at least a portion of future bot registrations.

Just as an additional to this, if anyone catches an obvious spambot, feel free to hard-delete the posts so we don't end up where we were with entire pages being dedicated to soft-deleted threads. I don't know why we were still doing it other than we'd just kind of always done it and never thought to change.

Don't do it for anything but obvious spam though, folks, just in case we need to go back to old posts.

I've always hard-deleted

I occasionally forget to tick the box, but as a rule I physically remove them, as it says.