i'm just glad i made it in in time. happy to be here guys

let's all cuddle!

*hugglez*

The internet can be a sucky place now. Ban YouTube! ;-) To solve the problem, you could use Asirra (http://research.microsoft.com/asirra/) - more fun than captcha!

<3 <3

I have noticed an increase of spam at qwdrama.com as well. Aksimet is another great utility for blocking spam btw.

or just filter anything with "http://" from non-admins

That asirra thing is interesting. I wonder how many images of cats and dogs petfinder has. For a spammer to break asirra all he/she needs to do is keep a database of all the cat pictures (or maybe just their filesizes or colorsums), and keep it updated everytime a new cat is lost. So asirra will only work if there are lots of cats/dogs being lost every day :>

I just hope Zalon gets active soon and we can open registrations again.

Why not just keep the registration open and delete spam as it comes? Is it REALLY that big of a burden that you have to totally close registration, or are we talking some ulterior motive here to force a quicker fix?

It has been getting worse lately with more frequent spam as well as weird porn spam which makes it a pain to browse the site from work for example. :}

I checked for a captcha plugin on the punbb site and there seem to be a couple of them at least.

Yeah it actually is, especially when you first got 1 spam per day, then 3 spams per day and finally 10 spams per day before the registrations got closed. Better fix it quick and re-open registrations that waste time on deleting that spamshit + bot-users.

People can still register after the problem is solved somehow, or contact one of the admins and ask for registration if it's really necessary some reason or another.

phil: good point about the DB, but they have got about 3million images so the spammer scum would need to take a fair ehile to catalogue them all.

raz0: I have a couple of very unpopular sites and am involved with some slightly popular ones - spam (mail and registrations) is a huge problem now - wastes loads of man power. The internet needs redesigning with security in mind - I will do it a the weekend ;-)

Some spam things also check for success on their targets, if they see that their spam came through, they will spam even more. So closing until a solution was installed is the right thing to do.