Spambusters!

[cmoon]

[strobe_z]

[putrocca]

Yes, cmoon, I've made you a mod, so please hunt down the spam as best you can.

We're still working on figuring out how to prevent spam registrations - I've been spending 20 minutes a day or more just deleting spam members and we still have more than 50 for me to zap tomorrow... hopefully the webmaster will solve it soon.

[cmoon]

AWESOME!

Yeah, spam has been bad everywhere. There's a much older board I'm on that has nothing to do with comics or Tezuka, but that have pretty high level security, and the spammers still get on somehow (some I've seen duplicated here.)

If there was greater traffic, a bit of spam here and there wouldn't mean much, but on given days, there's been more spam than anything else. That and the porn spam is absurd.

Now I can kill it myself! YES!!!

[putrocca]

Glad you're enthusiastic.

When you remove spam, please post her periodically to let me know how much of it you've been finding and eliminating so I can keep track of how much there is, and whether our webmaster's increased security measures are having any effect.

And thanks for the help - it really frees me up to pay attention to more important things like new content.

[cmoon]

Yeah...I still owe you some content as well (gotta free up some time somewhere.)

Haha! I'll create a sig file with spam kills, and you can change my Tezuka reader to 'spam hunter'

[putrocca]

Sounds good, spam-hunter.

[putrocca]

I've put in another half-hour on deleting spam registrations and gotten it down from 125 users total to 76 users total. There are probably another 20-30 spam memberships left for me to delete tomrrow, and then we'll have undone all the damage from the 3 weeks I was on vacation this month. I am not looking forward to doing this again after the holidays.

[cmoon]

Ha! They say the spambots have gotten smarter, but I have a new way around it. For membership, you have to pass an online quiz (note that any human being could go to Tezuka in English and fine the answers). By quiz I mean identify which of four pictures is Black Jack, which of four characters is Astroboy, etc. There probably isn't anyway to do this, but I assume that if a spammer has to spend more than 30 seconds trying to log on to a message board, they're going to move elsewhere.

[putrocca]

Te he - that certainly would be a fun way to do it. Too bad I don't know how.

[strobe_z]

[strobe_z]

[putrocca]

Short-term at least all the Spam members have been deleted. We seem to have 35 real members, of which about 5 are old accounts that never do anything but were at least made by real people so I'm leaving them be. We're also at 966 posts total, so coming close to the 1,000 post mark. We'll have to celebrate.

[cmoon]

Yeah, I just deleted two (or was it three?) accounts this morning that hadn't posted, but were very evident in their profile that they were created for the sole purpose of spam.

About how many new accounts are we getting like this, per day?

[putrocca]

Per day? Usually between four and eight spam registrations per day. Sometimes ten or twelve on a bad day. I think I deleted 6 today, and there's a new one already.