Is Spam Still an Issue

[Adrian Schneider]

Hey Guys,

Context: I'm looking at potentially reviving an old project of mine.

Are forums still facing issues with fighting spam? Personally, I hate CAPTCHAs to death. I hate seeing people struggle with them, get discouraged, and leave a site. Even I get frustrated with some of them...

1) Are CAPTCHAs actually solving the problem (when users can use them)

2) Are users being discouraged by them? (has anyone tracked bounce rates on pages w/ them?)

3) In the absence of a CAPTCHA, are the existing tools sufficient?

4) Do you have tools to fight HUMAN spam?

Anyone have any thoughts on the matter?

[Boofo]

I use the question and answers and have not had any problems so far. SPAM will always be a problem, so anything that you can add the fight that will definitely help.

[Adrian Schneider]

Thanks for the reply, Boofo.

I agree. I'm jut not sure how much of a problem. I also added a fourth question, which is something that none of the main spam solutions address.

[Boofo]

I haven't seen anything that will stop Human SPAM. I'd be very interested in your solution.

[cellarius]

I agree with Boofo. Although I don't have bot-issues atm (Q/A in a non-english language), I use enough boards that have. Captcha/reCaptcha in all forms is pretty useless by now, IMHO. Fighting human spam always is an issue, and I'd like to see anything that helps with that.

[Boofo]

Right now I use IsBot (by calorie) and that stops most bots before they get anywhere near registering. I also use Glowhost's Spam mod and that helps with links. I use the Q&A for all else and have had no problems yet, but then I don't have a lot of traffic to the site. I'm sure the bots will figure those stop-gaps out sometime and it would be good to have another, if not better, option.

[Mark Hewitt]

Still a massive problem. I have email verification, question & answer. AND I ask people to write something about themselves to verify they are human. But still on average 1-2 spammers a day get through the net.

Mostly they aren't the obvious ones they are the cunning type who reply to posts with something like "Thanks, that's very interesting", then include a link, of course.

The problem being that I have to verify all registrations manually, which is a pain for new users as once they have to wait a few hours for me to get out of bed, they may have lost interesting in posting on the forum.

[boodog]

I have captcha and Q&A followed by new member's first three posts going into a moderation queue.

[Adrian Schneider]

If anyone can spare a few minutes to fill out the survey in my signature, it would be much appreciated.