Spam members

[Molly]

It's getting pretty irritating with the gazillion of spammers that try to get in every day.

I'm no good with fixing stuff like this myself, but perhaps someone else of the site admin is?
I've noticed that several other Discussion Forums have a sort of capture, where you have to retype a word that is a bit hard to read, before you get accepted.

Isn't this something we could do here too?
Or at least set it up it so we can delete a full pagelength, without having to mark the boxes on each?

[Prometheus]

CAPTCHA isn't a bad idea but even I dread when I need to do a verification since I can't read them half the time and I need to try a few times to generate one I can read. But I think it would slow down the spammers and let us see potential real forum users and not spammers.

I will look at see what needs to be done. This might need Thotter to look into.

Some addition info from the main site is below:
http://www.captcha.net/

And modules for our base forum:
http://custom.simplemachines.org/mods/index.php?action=search;basic_search=captcha

Prom

Possible scripting pages:
http://www.phpcaptcha.org/
And:
http://www.captchacreator.com/

[Pix]

Why not have something that approves usernames which are names of players in the MUD automatically?

[Once]

Because that'd involve having the forum and the mud integrated in a far more intensive fashion which would probably take at least 4 - 10 hours of active development time (which is probably better spent elsewhere). 

I think we should look at upgrading the forum software as I know there's a lot of good SMF modules out there, or look at other Forum software altogether (most have SMF database import utilities) which would give us a lot more tools to put to use not just with regards to spam but with making the forum and community side of this more interesting.


-Once

[Pix]

Fair point.

I was actually thinking of this idea - but didn't realize it would take that long!

1. New player joins MUD.

2. He creates an account.

3. Mud then stores the information: "account name" + "email address" somewhere, maybe a text file or something.

4. Forum checks this text file daily. If there's a new name there, create account with random password, and send via email to player.