Codies, Fix your forum

[Bcolt93 0]

The spam every day is an absolute joke. You managed to encrypt your files well enough that it took people almost 5 months to scratch the surface, but you cant ban the same user name or come up with a way to prevent these bot accounts from posting every night. 

[Lozzy 0]

They're not bots, they're people, at least for some of the time. They can get past captcha when they sign up so if you have any bright ideas for how to stop them please do tell me because I'm as bored of deleting their spam as much as you are seeing the posts (nobody actually reads it right?).

[SkiddyMcCrash 311]

Yisc said:

I think the best way to prevent them from spamming the forum is to restrict new accounts of posting X new threads per day.

That wouldn't work, most of the time the spammer is making 2 or 3 posts and then switching accounts to post another 2 or 3 (At least, that is what they do when I'm still awake at night when they post the spam).

Yisc said:

You could even take it further and totaly disallow new accounts to open new threads at all and then slowly up the number of new threads that someone can open, when their account exists longer AND has activity in other threads.

That wouldn't work either as the spammer would then just post their spam in existing threads.

The only restriction like that that would possibly work would be to remove new members ability to post links.

[Lozzy 0]

Yisc said:

One other question while I am on it, why is it impossible to write a reply without quoting someone?

I just can't get the cursor in the "leave a comment" box, without quoting someone.

Which browser are you using?!

[scottishwildcat 187]

Is there really no way to automatically put a an approval hold on posts that contain certain strings (which would seem like a fairly basic feature for forum software )? Given the spam all seems to mostly consist of random Korean characters, being able to auto-hold any posts that contain Korean characters would be a good start, until they switched to something else.

[SamuelTrautman 0]

I know how you can fix it, stop pizzing gamers off by selling half finished games.

[scottishwildcat 187]

If the spamming is being done by anyone who's ever even heard of Codemasters, I'll eat my kecks.

[SamuelTrautman 0]

pmsl so how would they know where to post the spam?

[hobbsy777 0]

Question: What are other forums doing that they don't get this? Came across this amount of spamming once before affecting a flight sim related forum. They changed their forum.

[Operator1 4]

I've seen other forums place posts by new users in a private pre-approval queue to be approved by moderators before becoming publicly viewable. Then, at any time afterwards, a moderator has the ability to clear a new user for normal posting (no longer requiring moderator pre-approval).

[Tourgott 0]

Lozzy said:

They're not bots, they're people, at least for some of the time. They can get past captcha when they sign up so if you have any bright ideas for how to stop them please do tell me because I'm as bored of deleting their spam as much as you are seeing the posts (nobody actually reads it right?).

Why do you not just block Chinese signs (nobody else uses them).

[mmpaw44 0]

One wonders why they even take the time to create such stupidity???

If they have nothing better to do than keep making spam accounts/post/threads then i feel sorry for them...

[Leader 4]

Lozzy said:

They're not bots, they're people, at least for some of the time. They can get past captcha when they sign up so if you have any bright ideas for how to stop them please do tell me because I'm as bored of deleting their spam as much as you are seeing the posts (nobody actually reads it right?).

I think your find they are bots, they probably use SQL injection to get past the security, there are ways to stop, I.E stop using crap forum software, update server software, signup with a forum spam service, I could go on but I think you get the idea.

[Lozzy 0]

I'm just passing on what I was told. Options are being explored but until then just don't click on em and they might just go away eh.

[Lozzy 0]

Don't worry about reporting them, when I see them I just delete them and ban the users for what good that will do.

I've no idea why you cannot post without quoting someone. Edit: Your user was shown as unverified, I've changed that, see if that helps.