Google, of all the cool thing's you've done, this is DEFINITELY not one of them.

I think Jillin had a solution back there I think, bots can't read images to make an account so that's one way to rule them out. Those that do it manually well, I don't know about that unless you can ban their IP from the Forums.

They can.

Well that depends, the technology is called CAPTCHA, and how effective it is depends on the type of captcha system used, but as with most things computer related, as people introduce better systems to shut automated spamming out, spammers develop the technology to defeat that. Character recognition software is continually improving which defeats the captcha which is then made more complex to keep up, to the point some CAPTCHA systems are barely readable by the human users IP bans have limited effect. There are many illegal AND legal ways to spoof/change your IP.

Actually I can think of only one sure fire way off the top of my head, and that is to only be able to have a forum account if you have an account within lusternia... but has it's own lot of problems and is probably not viable.

One option that the people on my forum thought of was to restrict anyone from posting a new topic until after they have replyed to a topic (that is, they have a post count of 1 or more). Problem being that such measures are rather discoraging to new members, and the spammers might just try to make replys instead.

Then you introduce a whole new kind of problem that has been plaguing battle net and other free games. Bots that creates a game account and then spam advertisments INSIDE the game. Imagine ...

(Serenwilde) CoolBot32 : SIGN UP AT FOR FREE PORN! WE HAVE ........

You get the idea.

Hmmm thats not a bad idea, what about something along these lines, a particular topic must be replied to before your allowed to reply to or post new topics? The information on which topic this is will only be ingame?

Also in terms of my idea to have registration linked to the game, you could still have different names but the forum registration process must involve activation using an account within Lusternia and forum account can only activated by a character after at least 1hr of play? I'm not sure exactly how difficult the mechanics of that would be, but I think it would be possible?





ewwwww ok, perhaps an ingame registration wouldn't be so good....

Oh look. Obscene forum spam this time.

Oohh. That explains why on the unofficial WoW forums that I post at we get a lot of accounts made with 1 post, posting gold ads, powerleveling sites and everything else that community and I despise. It's a bloody bot!

Make more moderators who can only delete spambot topics.

Then find and murder the creators of those spambots...