nothing happend. we still delete between 20 and 40 spamposts per day. but even moderators are mere mortals and need to sleep some hours per day.
Yes, I know, and this exactly what I mean. If the community had a chance of deleting spam whenever we see it, there would be virtually no, say, gaps.
I don’t think moderators are in every possible time zone. The community, as a whole, can be/is.
Removing spam is no solution at all. It can’t be that hard to switch to another captcha system. Simply updating the forum software might also do the trick. (Concluding from the copyright note it hasn’t been updated for ~7 years.)
Of course it’s no solution. It’s a makeshift, I hope the upgrade is still planed, or even better, in progress.
getting rid of spam actually is retardedly easy. myself running a forum - know from my own experience. key element is to exploit the system that posts spam. those systems are automated and driven by various decaptching services where people in india are solving various captchas for cents.
So the solution: add a question to registration like “What company develops this engine?” with answer “Disney”, or “What university develops this engine?” with answer “Carnegie Mellon University”.
Thing is - automated systems will provide question to solver person with very little context if any at all. Since they have to work quick - even if they can see request comes from panda3d they will not care to google even for few minutes to figure out answer. And for new users - those questions are pretty basic, should not be big of trouble.
I admit… I thought I was looking at Amazon “dot kom” when I landed in the General Forums. 
I was like, “How did I get to this online store?” But then I realized it was just Spam on the P3D forums.
I guess stopping Spam without hurting the goodness of your website is tough. I know some websites which stop you from linking URLs period and some even stop you from linking images, which really makes a forum kind of boring.
The sad truth is… It’s Human nature to corrupt that which is good. There’s always going to be an unscrupulous person. When I look at my Server log sometimes I can see where external Clients were trying to hack my Server. I can’t help but think to myself… “Do these people have anything better to do than try to hack a Server?” Yes, people/orgs are behind all these nasty Bots and what not roaming the internet.
I’m so glad I can build my own data bases an do not need to install other Server helper software and languages like PHP. It seems like most attacks against my Server are PHP requests, which I do not use. Sometimes I might see one trying to access other kind of programs common to server use (like .htacess and ASP), but I don’t use anything special and just let my code do all the work, so my Server would be pretty “freakin” hard to hack on. 
I haven’t even given Spam protection a thought, but I guess I should. I do have a report button feature where anyone can report another user. When I think of building custom Spam protection now….I think of how some Email Spam protection work…by looking for key words.
Key words could possibly point out Spam. For instance, if the active thread is in the Sports Forum and someone submit a new Post which has a lot of key words like, “Jewelry, 50% Off, Shop, Savings, buy, Store, etc…”, I could then tell my CGI to not post the message and instead return a warning to the Poster, which will tell them their Post was flagged as Spam. In my example, we are talking about a Sports Forum, so key words related to shopping should not be apart of anyone’s Post.
New posts that are too small should be watched for as well. An idiot might think, “I’ll just type one ad line and post”, but as the developer, you could set a post minimum text limit when it comes to creating a new post. You could even allow the one sentence post if no out of place key words are found (according to Forum). There’s a lot of variables to think about with this kind of thing.
That’s just a quick thought though…. You would really have to fine tune your key word process and take into account the type of Forum the new message is being Posted to. For example…how would you handle a General Forum where anyone can talk about anything? That one would be tough to filter using key words alone. I guess I would simply take into account how often the Spam Key words occur within the message. Even in a General Forum, if someone’s new post contained a lot of words relating to advertising, one could assume the poster is in fact Advertising.
I might give something like that a try with my site. I don’t think the code write would be difficult at all…it’s the intelligence of the code write…that is where the brain power will come in. I wouldn’t want to flag somebody for Spam because they post a legitimate message.
Including such AI in the CGI would come later. Tomorrow I’m getting back to developing my LPM System. I wasted three days because my Server Software was broken and I was looking in all the wrong places. I finally changed Server Apps and everything is fine now.
My new Server build even uses less CPU time. 
“Lol”
Perhaps when the forum software gets upgraded it’ll include a ranking system so it’ll be possible to downvote any spammers who make it past the captcha, as well as people who post long, rambling, stream-of-consciousness messages that have no point and don’t make any sense…
We can always dream.
–jonah
If something doesn’t make sense, it might be over your head; we all have different levels of IQ. I would rather this site’s Admin worry more about the Spam.
It’s not that difficult; email Spam Filters do it all the time and posting a message is just like sending an email.
It just comes down to who’s behind the programming work when the system is implemented. They must know what they’re doing.
When the system is implemented on my own site, I can invite you to check it out if you want to.
Your Spam won’t get far, I promise you.
I’ve added some stopgap code to filter out most of the bots, and I’ve also made the captcha more complicated. Work on the new server is nearing completion.
After the upgrade we did get an inrush of spam, both with phpbb3’s default CAPTCHA plugin and with reCAPTCHA. But we’ve then installed playthru (areyouahuman.com) and this seems to have done the trick. Playthru is more fun and less difficult than CAPTCHAs anyway.
Usually I’d now weave my “No JS for important things” flag, but if it solves the spam problem, then it’s definately worth it. Big thanks rdb, for all the work you put into the website so far.
Thanks. 
By the way, don’t worry about the occasional spammer that still pops up, there are still some that have registered a few days ago and hadn’t posted yet. If it’s one that registered recently, though, then I’ll have to add additional measures.