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General suggestions or questions about the SparkFun Electronics website
By reklipz
#17166
I've been noticing (especially recently) these bots that people are spawning of SFE to spam links and such.

I don't really have a problem with them except that they are an annoyance to see sometimes.

I know it's been suggested before, but one way to stop them, is to require an activation e-mail for all registering users.

I think it's a good idea, and I know it will have results.
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By phalanx
#17211
I would support this 100%. Besides being an annoyance to you, they are an even bigger hassle to track down and delete. On top of that, I can't spend all day on the forums waiting for the spammers to post so I can delete them. I was unable to check the forums this weekend due to previous plans and the spam built up to a fairly large quantity.

Hopefully Sparky (Nathan) will see this and chime in if it is an option or not.

And for those that have asked (through PMs or other means), I do not have the power to make changes to the board (other than deleting spam) and I am not an employee of Sparkfun. I've simply been a customer of Sparkfun since its humble beginnings and try to help out when I can.

-Bill
By Philba
#17227
I'll add the the request. the amount of spam has gotten really annoying and once the spammers see that it works here, you will get even more.

Requiring some sort of authorization cycle would be a very good thing though i don't know how much work that would be.
By reklipz
#17234
Philba wrote:Requiring some sort of authorization cycle would be a very good thing though i don't know how much work that would be.
It's actually as easy as checking a checkbox in the admin section.
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By sparky
#17315
Hi all,

I am all about limiting the current spam level. However, here are the current posting limitations:

You must be a registered user to post
Registered users must enter a slightly obfuscated code (the funny looking work thing during registration)

Is seems that the spam bots are able to scan and extracted the anti-spam code that most of us can barely read...

Any recommendations on how to further limit the spam are welcome,
-Nathan
By reklipz
#17332
well, the SPAM only occurs in the forum with the most posts...

so, if you created say a SPAM forum, with more posts than any other forum(could somehow do this via the DB tools, not manually), and the bots will spam there.

Not really a solution, but it keeps us from having to see it.

Right now they just search the HTML for the highest number (they know the formatting of the HTML), so if you locked the forum, maybe it would just bork their system?
By reklipz
#19375
It's starting to get pretty bad...

http://www.phpbb.com/phpBB/viewtopic.php?t=427852

Quick idea that we could try.

Send me the phpbb file for the registration, and registration check.
I'll add two checkboxes:
[ ] Please check this box(helps prevent spam)
[x] Please uncheck this box(helps to prevent spam)

The bots wont have this in their script, but all users will be able to do it, on the register check page, ill write code to check that these are right, if not it will kick them back as though they filled out the form wrong.