Firestorm12
March 30th, 2010, 10:18 PM
Bots and spam have been pretty bad around here lately. Really bad. So, I went ahead and took care of a few things...
1) Deleted a bunch of bot accounts. I basically went through the users list and deleted as many bot accounts as I could. There might be a few here and there that I missed (some aren't so obvious), but a good chunk of them are gone.
2) Changed around the human verification for registration. You know when you sign up for various sites you see a picture with letters and numbers (sometimes words) that you have to type in a box to complete registration? Well, that's supposed to keep bots away, but bots are smarter now. We had the same system, so bots flowed right into the site. Now, we've got a question and answer verification to keep the bots out. The question? "What videogame does Halopen use to make movies?" ;)
3) Moderation of new members. When new people signed up, they had immediate access to posting in the forums. So, I changed that up a bit. Now, before any new members can post (or even send messages to others), they have to be approved (or declined if they're bots). Right now, only McStarken and I can do this, but soon, moderators will be able to help out with the bot control.
1) Deleted a bunch of bot accounts. I basically went through the users list and deleted as many bot accounts as I could. There might be a few here and there that I missed (some aren't so obvious), but a good chunk of them are gone.
2) Changed around the human verification for registration. You know when you sign up for various sites you see a picture with letters and numbers (sometimes words) that you have to type in a box to complete registration? Well, that's supposed to keep bots away, but bots are smarter now. We had the same system, so bots flowed right into the site. Now, we've got a question and answer verification to keep the bots out. The question? "What videogame does Halopen use to make movies?" ;)
3) Moderation of new members. When new people signed up, they had immediate access to posting in the forums. So, I changed that up a bit. Now, before any new members can post (or even send messages to others), they have to be approved (or declined if they're bots). Right now, only McStarken and I can do this, but soon, moderators will be able to help out with the bot control.