Virginia Gun Owners Forum - VGOF

This morning when I started to read the new messages I found that once again we've been targeted by a spam bot.
This one signed up and logged in as cfjhglh18.
I am aware that it's posts have been reported and soon a moderator will delete them and the bot.
When I took over as the main moderator for the forums of The Second Amendment March, which use the same software as these forums, I was seeing almost 100 bots per month sign up and post.
I installed a simple CAPTCHA modification to the forum software and now it takes an actual human to set up a membership to be able to spam that forum.

Side note: The TSAM forums are still online but have absolutely no activity except for me and one other moderator. Anybody that posted or read anything on them knows that they WERE very slow. This has changed. They were moved to a commercial host that is quite fast and has very fast access to the net.
You can find them here, go through the sign up procedure and see how bots are kept out.

We recently were deleting up to 5 or more spambots per day here and the built-in PHPBB CAPTCHA no longer does any good. The bot writers have figured out a way to screen capture and pull the digits out or something.

About a month ago, I added a new field to the signup process which requires that a new registrant answer the question "Add 12 and seven" before being permitted to continue with the registration process. This has resulted in stopping almost ALL spam bots from registering on this forum. We have seen approximately 4 successful spam registrations in the last month, and it is assumed that all 4 of them were actual humans who are out spamming forums manually.

I see the checkbox approach that the TSAM forum uses and I would imagine that it's pretty effective. If the "Add 12 and seven" stops working for some reason, I may implement something similar.

I and the moderator staff keep a close eye on spam registrations and appreciate all user feedback and post reporting when spam is found on this site. Please continue to report posts, as necessary, and we will continue to remove offending users from our membership roster.

Thank you for your input Alan. VGOF appreciates any and all comments that can help make this forum better for everyone to enjoy!

Rick

Not sure if it's the case here, but on a couple other forums I use Tapatalk was removed and the mods said that's how they were getting in.

snatale42 wrote:Not sure if it's the case here, but on a couple other forums I use Tapatalk was removed and the mods said that's how they were getting in.

Interesting thought that I hadn't considered. Thank you for it - I'll keep an eye on it.