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[Groundsplitter]

You may not have noticed, but for the last 3,5 months we have been having significant problems with spammers. We have had about 40 registrations in this time, of which at least 13 have been confirmed spammers. The list of spammers has increased by more than 50%! – in December we had blocked 22 spammer accounts since the start of the latest board in February 2006 (in 58 months), now, three months later, we're up to 35!
And the pace has continued to increase. Of these 13 latest spammers, 6 of them have turned up in the last four weeks!

Naturally this have been very frustrating. Even though we have caught most of them very fast, before they have had time to do any visible damage (i.e. post their crap on the board), I have worried that they would spread their rubbish in other ways, like over the PM system or by using the e-mail form.

I have been trying to reinforce the board with new subroutines a couple of times, subroutines that should supposedly check every new registration against global lists of known spammers, but for some reason I haven't got it to work – the protection hasn't taken, and the spammers have continued to sign up.

Until now. Yesterday evening I finally ironed out the last glitches, and got the wretched subroutine to work! And I didn't have to wait long for confirmation either – the first scumbag was caught earlier this morning, at 5:00.

So for the moment, the NTFA Forums has won the battle against the spammers. The fort is now protected by a 3-meter tall armored wall with barbed wire on the top, and entrance only through a reinforced and heavily guarded metal door. No identified spammers get through here!

This post has been edited by Groundsplitter: 2 April 2011, 12:14

Reason for edit: Changed "serious" to "significant". Serious is when you have to spend precious time actually deleting large amounts spam. And it hasn't been that bad.

[vmv-81]

Good job! Keep on fighting, comrades!

[Inkku]

WOOHOO..!!

[Protek]

Great work!

[SonicReducer]

So for the moment, the NTFA Forums has won the battle against the spammers. The fort is now protected by a 3-meter tall armored wall with barbed wire on the top, and entrance only through a reinforced and heavily guarded metal door. No identified spammers get through here!

Dude, you make me think of you as a real-life Tron. I want to visit the grid too!

[Groundsplitter]

Dude, you make me think of you as a real-life Tron. I want to visit the grid too!

Hehe. Thanks, I appreciate that comparison, even if I don't really see myself as anything like that.

But I guess that I will go "tron" on some more spammers soon - one of my bosses forwarded a copy of an order form today, filled with a lot of crap plus a fake e-mail address and an advertisement. Apparently they've become much more frequent recently, and have grown to become a major nuisance (which I wasn't aware of until today). "Is there anything we can do about this?" he asked. "Yes" I said, and told him about this latest addition to the NTFA Forums.
That's one of the advantages of having programming both as a hobby and as a job - I gain new experiences from both, and can reuse the same code on multiple sites to increase the security and/or the features of them all.