Is it possible to have guest posting restrictions added and one of those funky little pictures with letters and numbers in it that you have to enter to become a member of the forum? It would squash all these annoying spam threads. I'm all for a bit of Britney Spears hardcore porn or adding a few extra inches to my ego, but I can just check my Hotmail account for that.

I swear they're getting weirder and weirder. Saw one today on Pokemon porn.

Oooh baby.

Just so you know, guest posting IS restricted. What's happening is there is now software widely available to these spammers that abuses the code base for a variety of different forum hosts(invision included among them) and allows these spammers to get around the post restrictions, needing to register and even the little "picture" confirmation needed that is supposed to prevent anything but an active human from creating an account.

The only way to stop the spam from coming through is blocking the IP addresses, which we have been doing, but as you can see there are a bunch of them. The majority of the spam we are getting is coming in through proxies so even if we ban the IP it's not blocking the source from the forums.

Oh right, I didn't know that. Slippery little suckers!

Thanks for the info .

Dont worry we'll be keeping an eye out for those little howny buggers.

What does Howny mean?

And is it true that it is best not to reply or click on spam threads? Lets the spammers know someone's checking it out?

Edit: ACK they can spam even our last trading post! Noes.

If you want to know what howny means, verbalize it, and then pretend you're acting like you're three.

As for replying to spam, or messaging us, leave it alone. The gods and mods are on enough to take them out.

Sadly, I think we're getting 10+ a day right now.

Actually they dont go back to check the forums. Its just turn the spam program on, select a target site, go, select another site... blah blah.

If that term howny gets famous I should get the credit! Howny! howny!

...yikes. Saying that word like you're three years old is just wrong.

Anyway, I think the only possible suggestion is to either wait until Invision makes their forums less susceptible to spammers, or consider migrating to another forum engine. I'm not very sure about their anti-spam safety or the level of security of their CAPTCHAs, however, so I'll have to refrain from recommending an alternative. The cost and inconvenience of migrating all the forum post history would be prohibitive, unless the MySQL database used is compatible with other comparable software (Again, I'm not particularly knowledgeable in the subject). ALthough maybe we're behind in updating iPB; at any rate, it seems we're screwed and there's nothing we can do about the spam.

phpBB is something I used in the past. Not sure about conversion possibilities though, or if it still even exists and is save from bots. vBulletin is a not free alternative but offers tons of support and is quite quick in updating if a leak is found.

Those spam bots are getting weird...

The forums have an ability to tell you when a person responds to the thread, I imagine it also knows who views the thread. so Yes, I would suggest not clicking and Especially not responding to a thread with spam on it.

They don't check the forums but they certainly can have the bot tell them how many times the spam is viewed.

There is no forum option to check to see whenever people view a thread, as that would lead to a massive amount of inbox/PM spam. Open the thread all you want, just don't actually click on any of the links in the thread or reply to it.

There is no forum option to bypass the security and post as guest either...

Sarapis has been considering moving IRE forums to a diffferent engine. See: http://forge.ironrealms.com/2006/08/23/forum-software/

Also, why would you WANT to click on most of those threads *eyeshift*

Alsoalso, the spambots can post in any forum they choose, if they have the priveliges, because they're all numbered. Often they deliberately pick a non-general forum to make it less suspicious. Furthermore, they will sometimes seem completely innocent, going "Hi, this seems like a great community, I hope I'll get to know all of you." and there being a link to a commercial website in their profile. Note that these ones hardly ever reference anything to do with that particular forum, and if they do, it'll probably bo the domain name or "Lusternia Forums" or something and it will in no way reference Lusternia itself any further than that.

BE AWARE