Guest Posting Enabled, Email Form Disabled

Duff

Since nobody wants to bother answering emails, I have removed the email form from the contact page, and replaced it with a link to the Site Issues forum.

To encourage posting, I've enabled guest posting in the four WinWorld-related boards (Site Issues, Hardware, Software and Random Crap). We'll do our best to stay on top of any spam.

BlueSun

Didn't take long at all for the spam to start. I see this getting out of hand pretty quick, so I suggest adding a CAPTCHA to the guest post forms.

Slight annoyance, but it's the only way to enable guest posting and not have to deal with loads of spam.

Duff

Yeah, I expected as much.

The registration form uses ReCaptcha for registrations, I don't know how hard it'd be to implement it for guest posting as well.

BlueSun

It should be pretty easy to do. Just requires a little time to add it to the right places. Which if memory serves, should be posting.php, post_body.tpl and viewtopic.php

Duff

Guest posting has been disabled temporarily until we get a CAPTCHA in place to stop spam.

Kirk

Unfortunately, captcha still can't stop idiots. Maybe we should have an IQ test as a part of the registration form.

Rioter

I'm suprised that it took this long for the spam to start again. Thought it would have been quicker than that.

Ka0s

hey wait a minute guys -- lets all relax about spam some... as stitch knows, i send spam every night, and even got my company in trouble for the volume of spam i was sending...

... THERE IS a nice person behind all that spam whos just trying to get the bills paid.

stitch

Ka0s wrote:

hey wait a minute guys -- lets all relax about spam some... as stitch knows, i send spam every night, and even got my company in trouble for the volume of spam i was sending...

... THERE IS a nice person behind all that spam whos just trying to get the bills paid.

ahahahahhahahha you have a point. if it was topical though.....

Duff

Just posting this here instead of leaving it in IRC:

1) We should implement a CAPTCHA like BlueSun uses on Hypnos, it seems to work well. It won't stop people getting paid to post garbage, but it'll stop bots better.

2) I don't imagine it'd be too difficult to purge all the zero post users from the database. It'd cut the size of the list in half.

In the meantime, I'll try to stay on top of the spam.

BlueSun

There's a mod I use on Hypnos called Prune Users, it works well to clear out the zero post users. You can build a list of users with zero posts and flag them. Then send out a notice, unflagging users that want to keep their accounts and deleting the flagged users that don't respond.

As for CAPTCHA, I use dCAPTCHA by adragons... it seems to get the job done and it's easy to implement.