17-01-2012, 03:26 PM
Hey guys/girls,
First of all apologies for some of the spambots that have signed up over the last week, I know a few people have noticed it. As the site is getting bigger and more popular, and getting a higher search index on Google, we become more of a target for spambots and/or hackers (and yes we have had people attempt to hack the site). Forums are regularly targeted anyway, but it's becoming more frequent now as we are growing.
Unfortunately spambots have been able to sign up due to flaws within the way that Google's Captcha service runs. Google is trying to digitize old books, and every time you fill in a captcha form for them you're actually entering the words that Google's software hasn't been able to correctly identify or verify, which allows incorrect characters to be submitted.
I have just changed the user registration so that it asks a simple question, but hopefully not one that can easily be answered by a bot. I will be keeping an eye on user signups over the next few days, and I'm hoping that the new security question will work, however if you do see a spam thread, please just report it and we'll deal with it and change the question to something harder.
Cheers
First of all apologies for some of the spambots that have signed up over the last week, I know a few people have noticed it. As the site is getting bigger and more popular, and getting a higher search index on Google, we become more of a target for spambots and/or hackers (and yes we have had people attempt to hack the site). Forums are regularly targeted anyway, but it's becoming more frequent now as we are growing.
Unfortunately spambots have been able to sign up due to flaws within the way that Google's Captcha service runs. Google is trying to digitize old books, and every time you fill in a captcha form for them you're actually entering the words that Google's software hasn't been able to correctly identify or verify, which allows incorrect characters to be submitted.
I have just changed the user registration so that it asks a simple question, but hopefully not one that can easily be answered by a bot. I will be keeping an eye on user signups over the next few days, and I'm hoping that the new security question will work, however if you do see a spam thread, please just report it and we'll deal with it and change the question to something harder.
Cheers