Spam prevention?

[Sven J]

Hi there,

Currently several subfora are massively being spammed by some obscure airline hogwash.

Is it possible to block this, maybe by a more specific "favorite theme/recently bought set" query during account setup?

This spamming really is a nuisance, as it puts serious topics far down the list. So any measure to prevent this would be greatly appreciated.

[Coryo]

Yeah, it seems really bad at the moment.

Maybe there should be a 24-hour restriction on new accounts creating new topics, that might mitigate it a little.

[jimmynick]

Yes, it's remarkably irritating. In the meantime I'm just reporting every such thread I see.

[aFrInaTi0n]

Thanks for the report, we are aware of it and also not happy. Seems AI helps spammers to render reCaptcha Methods useless vs bots. Funnily the spammers seem to have valid gmail accounts (account creation at google may also just be secured by reCaptcha..).

[Jim]

I would not be surprised if these are actually human spammers. Either way, very annoying.

[aFrInaTi0n]

Chances may be high its AI-assisted Bots as they are getting near the 100% rate of solving reCaptcha (v2, wide spread in the internet) already... Article from Tom's Hardware

[Jim]

Gotta love AI 

[Sven J]

So maybe a 24-hour waiting period as suggested by @Coryo would indeed be a good idea?
Or requiring new accounts to be manually activated by an admin?

[Jim]

10 minutes ago, Sven J said:

So maybe a 24-hour waiting period as suggested by @Coryo would indeed be a good idea?
Or requiring new accounts to be manually activated by an admin?

We have turned on a setting that posts for new accounts need to be approved first. Let's see how that goes.

[Sven J]

1 minute ago, Jim said:

We have turned on a setting that posts for new accounts need to be approved first.

That sounds perfect.

I only hope it doesn't mean a load of work for you.

[JesseNight]

In my days of running forums, the best way proved to be customizing the forum software. Spammers know how every forums package works and stay on top of that package's security updates to counter it. Their scripts can automatically register accounts and post simply by posting the right link and generating the correct session ID.
That used to be my key back in the days: customizing how the session ID was built in my forum software in a unique way. Of course that's not as easy as it sounds, and requires manual fixing each time the software updates (if you wanna keep following those updates that is).

TL:DR; have the forum software be different than the standard package in security and registration/posting handling so their standard scripts for this forum software no longer work. Hope this info can be of some use.