New Anti Spam measures

Post by **Midnight Synergy** » Fri Dec 22, 2006 3:02 pm

Hi all,

Several people have already noticed a few odd changes on the forum. I recently installed some new anti-spam modifications, and some of these changes (and some glitches) are likely results of those modifications.

The modifications have some "catchers" at the registration process to try to filter out spam bots. Your membership also doesn't show until your account has been activated (which explains the sudden drop of memberships from 2000 to 17something). In case a spammer gets through, they will also not be able to have a signature, website links, or any URLs in their posts until certain conditions are met.

It seems that some people have been caught in the middle of this. A few (legitimate) users are not able to display their signature, and there's been a few other odd hiccups (such as the "newest member" often showing up blank - probably because it was a spambot attempt). I'm sorry about that - please bear with us, those issues will be looked at over time (but not until we are reasonably sure that the spam mod is doing its job).

I hope everybody agrees that removing spam (and its questionable content) is worth a few extra hassles.

Best wishes,
Patrick

PS: The silly forum has also been wiped. This has actually nothing to do with spam, but was a stated policy for that section. It will continue to be periodically wiped (every few months) to give some relief to the database size.